The Importance of Being Aisling

by Emer McLysaght

  Suddenly Suzanne is there beside me, black backpack flung over her shoulder. ‘Statutory redundancy.’ She sighs dramatically. ‘Two weeks’ pay for every shagging year I’ve given this place. What a crowd of bastards.’

  Chapter 14

  ‘Don’t let them get in front of you,’ I hiss at Sadhbh, my eyes firmly trained on a couple skulking suspiciously near the top of the queue. He looks smug, like he’s already rented the place and done the big IKEA shop in his head. Not on my watch, mister. You can put those skrimtops and fluggelwaffles back. We are getting this place. Well, Sadhbh is getting it. Elaine and Ruby are back next week, and while I felt sorry for her initially, when I quizzed her on her methods it turns out she’s been doing a frankly woeful job of finding somewhere new to live. She’s arrived to viewings with not one reference printed out, she’s failed to find out the name of the estate agent so she can go straight in with, ‘Hello, Gary, I’m very interested and I have a bank statement here and all for you,’ and claims that there just isn’t much out there. I mean, I know the rental market in Dublin is tough, but is she trying at all? So I’ve offered to help her. I’ve been up and down from home like a yo-yo, between helping Mammy on the farm and personally dropping CVs into all of the top pensions companies in town. Of course, I’ve been applying for jobs online, but I read on KickstartYourCareer.com that some places like to see you face to face too. It shows enthusiasm, apparently. It’s certainly helping me get my steps in. With the shite redundancy money, the reality of having to get a job sooner rather than later is hitting me, and I really don’t think the opportunities are going to be a dime a dozen in BGB. I’m starting to wobble a bit about moving home too, although Mammy is delighted. It just seems like a bit of a step backwards. So I’ve had to give myself a few shakes and remind myself that I’m lucky to have a home to move back into – and sure isn’t minding Mammy an important job in itself? Still, I never thought I’d say it about Dublin, but I’m going to miss going for brunch. It’s mad what you can get used to if you’ve been exposed to it enough.

  Sadhbh has the new job sorted, though, so she’s alright there. She just needs the new place to live. Despite her effortlessly elegant appearance, rich, swingy hair and fondness for putting weekends in Oslo on her credit card, she doesn’t come from money and there’s not much support on the home front. Her mam rents a one-bed place in Rathfarnham, and there’s no mention of her dad at all. For the first little while I knew her I was only dying to ask about him, but it became clear fairly quickly that he wasn’t a talking point and the nosiness soon wore off me. Sadhbh and her mam are very close, and she’s giving her a chunk of the disappointing redundancy to help her out with a few things. But it means she doesn’t have the luxury of moving home, and she’s keen not to have to stay with two newlyweds.

  I haven’t had to look for a place to live since college but, with the right email alerts set up and a solid picture of what all the Garys, Deirdres and Simons showing apartments across the city are looking for, surely I can crack this problem for Sadhbh. So here we are outside a Georgian building in Ranelagh, ready to pump Gary/Deirdre/Simon’s hand and say, ‘We’ll take it.’ I must say, I’m surprised to see quite so many people here, and they all seem to have Important Envelopes with the deposit ready to go in their hands – not just me. There are two couples ahead of us in the queue and at least ten people behind us. It’s ten past ten and the viewing was due to start at ten so we’re all starting to shift around on our feet and make impatient huffing noises. At fourteen minutes past the door swings open and the estate agent barks out, ‘First three lots in.’ The six of us at the top of the queue shuffle forward into a dimly lit hall. Nothing too concerning about that. Sure, she’s not planning on living in the hall and the pictures of the flat itself looked lovely and bright and spacious with a classic feature wall painted a different colour behind the fireplace. That always screams elegance. The estate agent – Steven is his name; I was close enough – leads us up a flight of stairs and immediately I’m on alert. ‘Access to delightful garden’ had me thinking it was on the ground floor. But then again, maybe there’s an outside stairs. All good, all good.

  Steven stops outside number four, where the door is already ajar, and pushes it open. ‘In you go,’ he calls down the stairs where we’re all bunched up, trying not to viciously elbow each other. Couple number one file in and we all slowly follow. ‘Bathroom in to the left,’ says Steven as Sadhbh and I pass him. I’m barely in the door when the father–daughter pair in front of me stop dead and I accidentally graze the back of his heel with my runner. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I bluster, but to be fair it’s his own fault. We all have to get in. Looking around past him I see what the issue is. There isn’t room for us all in the flat. And it really is the whole flat. What looked like a separate bedroom in the pictures is actually a bed shoved up against a wall with a bedside locker separating it from the couch and doubling up as an end table. The couple who were first in the queue are already in the kitchen, with the man’s arse nearly in the sink. It had looked deceptively large in the pictures, although I did find it strange that the microwave was bolted to the wall at a height practically out of reach. Whoever took the photos must have climbed on top of the fridge to get the angles and maybe used one of those lenses they used to get the pictures of Kate Middleton in the nip in France. I’m not great on photography but there’s definitely been some trickery here. At least the feature wall is there behind the fireplace, although it spans the length of the room and isn’t so much the feature wall as the whole flat. Sadhbh shuffles behind me in to the left and peers into the bathroom, which mercifully is in a separate room. ‘Oh,’ she squeaks, ‘a … hose.’ I look around her and see what she means. It brings me back to one holiday Majella and I took to the Canaries and the only shower was beside the pool. Sure, how can you be expected to scrub your oxters in your swimsuit with seven Germans looking at you? I couldn’t bring myself to do it and was making maggots with the filth the whole week. Luckily, this hose in the apartment isn’t outside, but it is just a hose attached to a tap and then hung from a hook on the ceiling. No wonder there were only pictures of the toilet. I turn on my heel to quiz Steven.

  ‘The ad said a one-bedroom apartment?’

  ‘One bedroom and studio are kind of interchangeable these days,’ he rattles off, shoving a loose wire under a bit of carpet with his ludicrously pointy shoe and completely ignoring my gesturing towards the hose. ‘People love this kind of bijou living.’

  ‘You can open the fridge from the couch,’ Sadhbh retorts. ‘And the kitchen is behind a curtain.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it?’ Steven doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed.

  ‘What about the garden?’ I probe further. ‘There’s access to the garden?’

  ‘Yeah, you need to go back downstairs and around the side of the house, and there’s a creche on the bottom floor so there might be a few kids out there occasionally, but grass in this part of Dublin is at a premium so it’s a really stunning feature.’ His sales drawl nearly has me convinced. You can’t beat a bit of space to dry sheets.

  ‘You’re grand,’ Sadhbh snaps at him, grabbing my arm and pulling me out into the hall and back down the stairs. As we head out the front door we hear the first couple and the dad rustling their envelopes and clamouring about having three months’ rent. Sadhbh shoots past the people waiting outside, growling ‘Don’t bother’ at IKEA man through gritted teeth. I’ve never seen her so het up. She flies off down the road, and even in my Skechers I have trouble keeping up. When she finally slows to a manageable pace, I sling my arm through hers and give it a squeeze. ‘We’ll find something else. That place was a joke. And Elaine and Ruby aren’t just going to kick you out.’

  Elaine and Ruby may not be about to kick Sadhbh out until she finds something, but the time has come for me to make my move out of our lovely Portobello palace. I put off my final night until they got back from their honeymoon, so we could have one last evening
of drinking wine and the playlist slowly evolving from their inexplicable seven-minute-long ‘mixes’ to my Corrs and Westlife Best Of collections. I’ll never get tired of the image of Elaine and Sadhbh screaming ‘go-oh-on, leave me breathless’ into the necks of bottles of rosé. Beats their LSD Soundsystem and DeadmauFive any day, if you ask me. We had a little cry to ‘So Young’, with each of us taking on the persona of a Corrs sister. Sadhbh is always Andrea, of course. She has the hair. Elaine is usually Sharon and I’m Caroline. My tambourine playing in the school nativity plays was always highly commended by Mrs Irwin, and I’ve since felt that my calling as a percussionist was never realised. Ruby magnanimously agrees to be Jim, given that she’s only an honorary Chez SEA member, even though she is now Elaine’s actual wife.

  But now, with a heavy hangover that no amount of cold cans of Diet Coke will sate (you need two minimum: one for drinking and one for pressing against your temples), I’m packing the last of my stuff into the Micra and getting ready for the final journey home to BGB for … God knows how long? Majella’s already moved home properly and has been successfully getting Timoney’s bus every day. At least it drops her within walking distance of her school on its way out to the airport. She’s up to her eyes in planning her First Communion arts-and-crafts strategy, although she admits that making chalices out of CDs and holy doves out of doilies doesn’t really change from year to year. She has a few problematic parents this time round, including one who wants to bring in a professional camera crew for the Big Day, so even though it’s months away, she’s bringing Communion chat home to Pablo every evening.

  Pablo is happily installed under the Morans’ roof. Shem’s initial insistence that he sleep in the sitting room went out the window on the first night, with Majella announcing that it is the twenty-first century and dropping into the conversation that her own mother’s wedding dress was suspiciously tight around the belly. Shem was never going to get away with keeping them apart. He’s had his heart broken trying to control Majella since the day she was born. He always says if it wasn’t for me she would have ended up running away to join Riverdance. Joining Riverdance is a bit of a dream scenario, if you ask me – a bit like winning an Oscar for playing Mary Robinson or something – but Shem seems to think it would be like Sodom and Gomorrah with them all lepping in and out of clothes and beds. At least with Majella and Pablo under his own roof he can keep an eye on them. I was convinced Willy the dog would run Pablo out of the house long before Shem, but he seems to have taken quite a shine to him instead. In fact, I would go so far as to say Willy is harassing Pablo, hammering away at his leg whenever he gets a chance. I was over the other evening and Pablo was frantically trying to shimmy behind the old armchair beside the Aga in the kitchen, exclaiming, ‘Dios mío,’ and burning his arse on the hot plates of the range while Majella and her mother ignored him and bickered over the delegation of towels in the house. Pablo doesn’t appear to grasp the difference between a hand towel and one he might dry his feet on and is blissfully ignorant of the shortage of good bath towels. Tensions are high already.

  It’s a quieter affair in our own house. With Paul gone back it feels emptier than ever, although Mammy still has a steady stream of visitors. Women are great for visiting, but I’m looking forward to seeing John at Cillian’s thirtieth to even out all the oestrogen I’ve been exposed to. We’ve hardly set eyes on each other at all since New Year’s. Busy, I suppose. Mammy’s even had the new girl, Sharon, out to the house to do her hair while the salon is still under construction beside the butcher’s. According to Tessie, Marty Boland is gearing up to lodge an objection to the extension for the sunbeds. Tessie thinks it’s the idea of women being waxed within a 500-metre radius of him that’s the issue, but, truth be told, Marty Boland is just a bully. Tessie has a mole in the planning department in the county council so she’s always up to speed on planning wars. BGB could be set for a battle to rival the great bypass controversy of 2009, when plans to reroute the dual carriageway close to Michael Fennessey’s land and what he claims is a fairy ring nearly brought the council down from the inside. I don’t believe in fairies myself, but I’d rather walk across the M50 than walk across a fairy ring. I’m not stone mad.

  Chapter 15

  ‘Are you serious? Sombreros?’

  Does Sadhbh know nothing about Mexico? Sombreros are their signature hats. You couldn’t have a Mexican-themed thirtieth without them. Likewise the ponchos and fake moustaches that Auntie Sheila and Mammy bought in bulk from the costume warehouse on the N7. There’s even going to be piñatas filled with Babybels and bags of tayto because Cillian can’t stomach sweet things.

  We’re in Mammy’s kitchen getting ready for what is being billed locally as the party of the year. Everyone is going. Everyone!

  ‘Aisling, have you ever heard of cultural appropriation?’ she asks, taking a glass of the Merlot bought in especially for her. Mammy claims red wine causes migraines and actually believes Sadhbh is a bit of a medical marvel since she can drink it and not immediately have to lie down in a dark room with a wet facecloth over her eyes.

  I’m on my second glass of Pinot Greej and, honestly, I haven’t a bull’s notion what cultural appropriation is, but it sounds too heavy to be getting into now.

  ‘Listen, Sadhbh,’ Majella goes, helping herself to a handful of Doritos from the party stash. ‘Cillian loves everything Mexican so I’m going to wear a sombrero and you’re going to wear a sombrero and Aisling is going to wear a sombrero and we’re going to look like The Three Amigos but who cares? We’re only going to the Mountrath.’

  ‘Alright, alright,’ Sadhbh concedes, trying it on. She’s wearing dungarees, of all things, and silver boots and has turquoise going through the ends of her grey hair this week. Honestly, the sombrero makes the outfit and I can’t believe I’m even saying that. It’s not doing much for my own Savida wrap dress but that’s life. At least it was on sale. Can’t be buying new things in Dunnes these days, not since it’s gone so fancy with all the cracked colouredy designer things and Peaky Blinders bits for men, and anyway I’m unemployed. Still. I’ve barely made a dent in my redundancy. Who knows how long I’ll have to eke it out for? But I’m determined to stick to my New Year’s resolution to stay positive and paste on a smile and stay firm in the belief that something will crop up. And if not, I hear they’re looking for people out in the Garden Centre.

  ‘If I’d known there was a theme I’d have brought some of the turquoise jewellery I picked up in Tulum a few years ago,’ Sadhbh says, topping up our glasses. ‘I only unpacked yesterday and I have loads.’

  ‘So you’re properly moved in then?’ Majella asks.

  Just when Sadhbh was at her wits’ end with the rental market, a perfect solution cropped up. Majella’s old room! Sure, she had vacated the house in Phibsboro she’d shared with her teaching pals Mairead and Fionnuala, and they had their hearts broken trying to find someone new. They had entire families trying to get them to let the room to them and the email address they set up especially for the ad (FionnualaMaireadHouseNoCouples@gmail.com) was inundated, so they were dragging their heels waiting for someone perfect. Sadhbh ticks most of their boxes. Well, she lied about smoking, and enjoying late nights, and taking showers no longer than seven minutes, and rinsing out recyclables, and never leaving a pot to steep overnight unless it really, really needs it. But apart from that she fits the ‘clean, tidy, craic-loving gal (no couples)’ that was stipulated in the ad. Well, apart from the couples bit. I thought she was single when I suggested she move in, but she has since let slip that she’s been casually ‘seeing’ a lad she met in work. I finally got it out of her when she dodged an opportunity to come to a free wine yoke Majella got us invited to. Some launch of a new mascara she overheard two girls talking about in Brown Thomases when she was in buying her biannual bottle of Alien, her signature scent. She gets it in TK Maxx the odd time if she’s lucky. Anyway, they were talking about the new mascara and the free wine and the next thing you know
she has three invites in her paw. Sadhbh is not one to turn down a free glass of something, and throw in the make-up angle and I was sure she’d be there. But she vaguely said she was busy. So I rang her.

  ‘Are you sure you can’t come? Free wine and mascara? Me and Maj will stay out til the last Timoney’s bus. I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages.’

  ‘I know, I know. But I have plans. I have … a date.’

  I felt an instantaneous pang of jealousy. Well, two pangs. One for this lad who gets to spend time with our Sadhbh, and another for me and John and our early dates, grinning at each other over pints or snuggling together against the cold wind at matches.

  ‘Well, who is he? Do we know his father?’ I joked. Although, if she was in BGB chances are we would.

  ‘Just someone I’m seeing. Casually. A lad.’

  ‘When you say “seeing”, how long does that mean? Have you stopped waking up early to put on a bit of make-up before he sees you?’ I’ve never done this but I’ve seen it in the romcoms.

  ‘Aisling, you’re wild. It’s only been a couple of weeks. I’m just seeing him. He’s someone I met in work. A musician. I’ll tell you more if it becomes a thing. Promise.’

  A musician. Who could it be? ‘Is it a family band?’

  ‘Is it a what?’

  I couldn’t take the suspense. ‘Listen, Sadhbhy, you can tell me. Honestly. I’ll take it to my grave.’

  ‘Aisling, it’s not serious! And he wants to keep it on the DL.’

  ‘It’s Jim Corr, isn’t it?’

  She howled. I took that as a no, so.

  ‘Mickey Joe Harte?’

  ‘Aisling!’

  ‘Is it Niall Horan?’

  More laughing.

  ‘Hozier?’

  ‘Aisling, if you don’t stop asking me I’m going to burst a blood vessel.’

  I felt a bit deflated after that call. I didn’t feel like I could push any further than that, even if she is someone whose back I’ve fake tanned more times than you’d care to mention. I already feel like Sadhbh is slipping away from me, and I know less and less about her life. There was a time when I would have tried to keep a straight face as she pulled the dungarees out of a bag in the Chez SEA sitting room, but now I don’t even know who she’s shifting.