Locked Out of Heaven

by Shirley Benton

  12.55 a.m.: Arrive at Angela’s. Grab the Clearseal from the doorstep and jump back into the car.

  1.05 a.m.: Am too busy worrying about pretty much everything that I don’t notice I’m out of fuel until it’s too late.

  The car puts up a good fight, jerking along in the hard shoulder for half a mile before she gives up the ghost completely. Take out my phone.

  “Ah, for fuck’s sake!”

  The phone is dead.

  1.13 a.m.: I have only walked a few feet when the rain starts.

  3 a.m.: Four miles of walking to and from the nearest 24-hour service station later, am back at the car. Pour a small can of fuel into the tank with a funnel. The funnel slips and half of the fuel splashes all over me. An eternity and a decade of the rosary later, I’m on the road.

  4.30 a.m.: The copybooks are covered with evil Clearseal. Decide to end the day as I started it, with another Berocca from the bra to give me the energy to climb upstairs.

  4.40 a.m.: Am pulling the duvet up to my chin, when I hear footsteps. Debbie toddles in.

  “Mummy, I got sick!”

  6.30 a.m.: Go to bed. Set the alarm for 6.45 a.m.

  And you know what? That was actually a quiet day.

  Chapter 5

  I hadn’t realised money was going to be such a problem when I left my husband. Had I known there was any chance that things might end this way, there was no way I’d have given up my job as a counsellor years ago – mostly at Terry’s persuasion. Little did I know then that he’d lose everything we had.

  It all started when I went back to our old home to collect some more stuff for the kids. I’d tried to arrange a time with Terry for me to call when he’d be out of the house, but he’d refused to entertain any talk on the issue. We’d be coming back soon, after all – when I came round and saw sense. I’d take our child out of that school she wasn’t meant to be in, we’d get her place back in the Sorrento Hill school and we’d forget this ever happened.

  After countless episodes of this song and dance, I decided to call over myself while Susie was minding the little ones – the cost being a lamp of mine that I’d been instructed to come back with. “The one in the background of the photo you posted me of Sarah in the sitting room on the morning of her first day of preschool – hopefully it’ll be as nice in real life,” she’d said pointedly. Much as she professed to love Terry, Susie never liked to call round to our house – for reasons she never expressed – but she liked to make it sound like she was never invited, which was entirely another thing.

  I walked up the driveway, half-expecting one of my nosey former neighbours to accost me with questions. It had all come out. After two weeks of keeping the separation to ourselves, everyone now knew I was living back at home with my parents. By everyone, I mean Terry’s friends, family and business associates – I didn’t really have friends, just surface-level acquaintances with the mothers of Sarah’s friends. Oh, and the media. They knew, too.

  You might be wondering why the media would have any interest in me. In truth, they don’t. Terry’s the one everyone’s interested in – I’m just the sidekick wife. Good old dynamic Terry, the guy who came from nothing and went on to own a chain of the most exclusive pubs in Dublin. People seemed to lap up the story of the guy from the wrong side of town doing well for himself and Terry, in turn, soaked up every bit of attention that had come his way over the years.

  It was good for business, and good business kept us in the lifestyle Terry had made sure we’d become accustomed to with our too-big house by the sea, our car for every occasion and other such nonsense. He’d organised things over the years that had made my cheeks sizzle – shoots with magazines to show off our gorgeous home, that kind of thing. I don’t know why I’d always agreed to do things I was so uncomfortable with, but that was just kind of how Terry and I rolled. He made the plans and I went along with them.

  Until now.

  It hadn’t been difficult to keep it all under wraps at first. But when Sarah didn’t start at the school in Sorrento Hill, Terry’s friend Simon and Simon’s wife, Laurie, noticed Sarah's absence – their daughter was starting in the same year – and Laurie quickly she grew suspicious. Simon and Laurie lived in the detached house next door to ours and they cornered Terry on his way home from work, pointing out that they hadn’t seen the rest of us in a while and interrogating him until he admitted the truth. Well, he admitted that I’d left him, anyway – only temporarily, of course – but didn’t mention where I was now living. Terry was more ashamed of an association with Blackbeg than he was of his wife leaving him.

  A few days afterwards, an article appeared in a national newspaper about our separation. Coincidentally, Laurie’s friend Alice was the journalist who penned the article. The article included the information that Terry was still living in the family home, while my whereabouts was unknown.

  The following Monday, I was playing with Debbie in the sitting room, when I heard Willie and Susie hissing at each other in the kitchen. This was unusual. No roaring at the top of their voices? I went over to the door to listen in.

  “What good will it do telling her? You’ll only upset her,” Willie said.

  “She’ll hear about it from someone else anyway, eventually,” Susie replied. “It’s best coming from us.”

  “Someone like who? She never leaves this house unless it’s to drop Sarah to school or buy food. Never sees anyone, never gets phone calls. She’s as isolated now as she was growing up.”

  I threw the door open.

  “What’s going on?”

  They looked at each other. Willie eventually nodded, throwing his eyes up to heaven at the same time. Susie picked up Willie’s daily newspaper and handed it to me.

  “Page three,” she said softly.

  They’d snapped me coming back through the school gates, having dropped Sarah off, with a sign bearing the words “Blackbeg Educate Together” clearly visible in the background. I looked tired, overwhelmed, nonplussed – and hideously fat. Even worse, the tracksuit bottoms I was wearing were too short and you could see my cankles.

  I remembered that I hadn’t been able to find a matching pair of socks yesterday, which is when this photo was clearly taken, and had opted for shoes only instead. The huge bald patch in my hairline from my postpartum hair loss syndrome was clearly visible. What remained of my hair looked backcombed and knotted. Anyone looking at it would assume that Terry was the one who’d left me and this was the reason.

  I hadn’t always been such a mess. In my teens and early twenties, people used to describe me as “a tiny little thing”. I hated it. It made me feel insignificant. But at five foot two and rarely weighing above eight stone except for when I was pregnant with Hayley, it was probably fair to say the description was accurate.

  Looking back, I was petite and . . . tidy, I suppose is the right word. I wore clothes that suited my small frame, kept my curly hair under control and presented a “together” image to the world. I had good bone structure, thankfully, and I always made sure in the past to look after my skin well. I wasn’t sure when exactly I’d stopped looking after myself. But once I had, I always seemed too busy to restart.

  I rummaged in my handbag until I found a supermarket receipt and a pen and scribbled a note to myself on the back of the receipt: put water in all old mascara tubes when you next go back home. I really needed to start wearing mascara again – if there was any sense at all to be made of what I’d just seen, that was all I could find at this point in time. I thanked God I hadn’t had time over the last few years to tidy out my make-up bag, because at least now I had something to work with. It was that or mix soil from my parents’ garden with water and apply it to my eyelashes, because buying new mascaras wasn’t going to be an option.

  “Bet that’s the first time they’ve had someone who’s three stone overweight on page three,” I said, just to say something to fill the silence.

  Then I threw the paper on the table and went back in to Debbie before I s
tarted to scream in frustration. But after my initial anger dissipated, I wasn’t sure I cared any more. I just felt numb inside again, the same numbness I’d felt since I’d found out about Terry’s secret life. One day it would probably all hit me, but I didn’t have the headspace to take it in just then.

  I turned the key in the door of my former home. It was quite a contrast to the three-bedroom terraced house in Blackbeg we now lived in. This 3,500 square feet house with panoramic sea views was a trophy home, a “welcome to my crib” property, according to Terry. Privately, I thought it was a bit “footballer’s wife”. Don’t get me wrong – I certainly wasn’t complaining about having such a beautiful home. It just sat uneasy with me to be living in such a place, somehow. It seemed too much for one family – too big, too unnecessary.

  Visually, it ticked every box: the marble floors, the sweeping staircase, the gallery landing, the feature windows. All the fixtures and fittings were of the highest quality money could buy. It had a gym, an indoor pool, a Jacuzzi, a huge sauna and a ridiculous amount of reception rooms. We also had a bar and our own private cinema. The house itself was bordered by two acres of landscaped gardens that we rarely used and cost a fortune to maintain.

  Terry named the house “Heaven” when he bought it and compared to the environment we both grew up in, it probably was. That didn’t stop me from privately thinking it wasn’t an ideal house for children, though. It was too big, too easy to lose a child in if you took your eye off them for a few seconds. I sometimes woke at night in a panic about whether the indoor pool had been covered in case one of the children went wandering in the night and drowned, or if the door to the gym was locked in case they turned on any of the equipment and got their necks caught in a machine cord.

  When I let them out to play in the garden, I had to follow them everywhere because of the vast amount of land they had available to them – Hayley hid behind a rose bush once for a full hour and I’d been on the verge of calling the police and reporting her missing. It was too close to the sea and there was a private path from the back of our property to a secluded cove, which was just an endless worry for me. I eventually had to arrange to close off a section of the garden to contain the kids, like a rather large sheep’s pen, and the rest of the grounds were never used after that. Although I was a very lucky woman to live there, I never could shake the feeling that the house wasn’t right for me, or I for it.

  I was opening an upstairs window for fresh air, when I saw a man walking up our driveway, an entourage in his wake. I immediately went downstairs.

  “There must be some mistake!” was all I could say when the repo man explained the nature of his call.

  “You know you’ve been given every chance,” he said in a detached tone. “Your husband hasn’t paid your mortgage for a very considerable length of time now. As you’ve refused to agree to have your home repossessed and have been unable to meet the payments specified in your repayment plan, your lending institution had no choice but to take your husband to court to repossess your home.

  “After the court granted your lender a possession order, you were given time to make arrangements to repay your debt before a final possession order was made, but you failed to do so. As you’ve refused to hand over possession, you leave me with no choice as sheriff but to enforce that order. Now, we can do this the easy way or the hard way . . .”

  I suppose he usually got a response at this juncture – often colourful, I’d imagine, maybe insulting, or even both. But not from me. I could only stare at him and wonder if I was having some kind of brain fit.

  “Mrs Kenyon—”

  “Ms Richards,” I answered immediately, finding my voice.

  “I see.” Maybe he was suddenly starting to. “Ms Richards, did your husband make you aware of this situation?”

  “Mr . . . ?”

  “Ryan.”

  “Mr Ryan, what do you fucking think?”

  Chapter 6

  “Mum, can I do speech and drama classes after school?”

  Sarah walked over to me in the sitting room with a piece of paper she’d taken from her school bag. On it was a list of extra-curricular classes her new school had on offer – reasonably priced classes, but it didn’t matter what price they were when you had absolutely no means to speak of.

  “I’m sorry, pet, but I don’t have the money for it.”

  Sarah looked confused. As well she might – she’d never heard those words before, thanks to her father’s indulgent nature.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know how you need money to buy sweeties in the shop? Well, I need lots of money to pay for the speech and drama classes, but I don’t have much at the moment.”

  Her face brightened. “That’s okay – just ask Dad for it.”

  “Your dad needs his money for . . . something else. I’m sorry, Sarah. Maybe next year.”

  Sarah stomped off amid declarations of how it wasn’t fair and if her dad were here, he’d let her do the classes. I wished a plague of locusts on Terry for putting me in this position, although there was hardly any point, as I’d wished an infestation of rats on him earlier. He’d barely notice the locusts when he had the rats to be going on with.

  Susie snorted as she scurried around the room picking up various bits and pieces that belonged in the kitchen. “Sure, why would she need to do those? She can speak already and there’s more than enough drama going on in her life between her having to leave home and her parents being at each other’s throats all the time. The poor girl – I heard her humming along to that old Bruno Mercury song ‘Locked Out of Heaven’ on the radio the other day without having any clue that she literally is.”

  “It’s Bruno Mars, Susie.”

  “Whatever. I still can’t believe you’ve left Terry. And all over some piece of skirt you could have sorted out in a few minutes if you were strong enough.”

  “It wasn’t just . . . that. I wasn’t entirely happy anyway, to tell you the truth.”

  “‘I wasn’t happy,’ she says. What part weren’t you happy with, Holly? Was your house not close enough to the sea? Was your Aga not as big as your neighbour’s? That man adored the steam off your piss.”

  I sighed. No matter what the situation was, Susie had to have a say in it. You’d never think to listen to her that she was only fifty-six. She’d had my brothers, Cliff and Ricky, when she was sixteen and seventeen respectively, and me at eighteen. She might have sounded about eighty when she was giving out, perhaps ninety on a bad day, but looked rather unconventional.

  There were no tight grey perms or sensible clothes but plenty of bleached blonde hair, often with black roots, and black eyeliner. She was stick thin, but not from a healthy diet and exercise – she just didn’t eat. It started through a desire to diet, but now she had no interest in eating. She’d have the bare minimum just to stay alive, usually consisting of a slice of toast in the morning, a small tin of beans in the evening and a few Viscount biscuits throughout the day. Other than that, she just drank black tea – never, ever green or herbal.

  Although I sometimes called her Mum when I mentioned her to anyone else, when I spoke to her directly she always insisted on being called Susie. Dad then had to be Willie, because you couldn’t have a child calling their mother Susie and their dad Dad, even if the mother specifically requested or ordered them to call her by her name. But here was the thing – not only did I always refer to Willie as Dad when I was talking to Cliff, but sometimes I even called him Dad to his face when Susie wasn’t around. Just to test the waters, like. And you know what? He never pulled me up on it. I think he actually quite liked having a child of his refer to him as Dad. Just as long as Susie never found out, of course.

  Christ! my parents were exhausting.

  “Well? I really am curious as to why you were so unhappy, if you fancy telling me.”

  “Oh, it’s complicated. But I thought you wanted Terry and me to talk again . . . well, we’re talking,” I said to try to get Susie to ease
up a bit. “That’ll please you to hear, I’m sure.”

  “As long as it ends up with you resolving things,” Susie said as she walked away towards the kitchen with the bits she’d collected, “you keep up the talking.”

  Well, we certainly would be doing that. From the moment the house had been repossessed, I’d done nothing but demand answers from Terry. He’d given me no indication whatsoever that anything had been wrong with our finances before I found him up to no good.

  “If I hadn’t left you, I’d have been at home with the kids when someone came to take the house,” I’d ranted at him when I caught up with him in his new abode – a friend’s house, where Terry was occupying the box room. “What did you expect me to do with the kids once we were put on the side of the road? What if one of them had been sick that day? You knew this was going to happen and you gave me no warning! I had a feeling something was going on when you had the post redirected to work, but I never thought it’d be something as bad as this . . .”

  “Holly, I swear, I thought I could fix it all right up until the very end. I never thought it would come to this.”

  “God, have you been lying to me about absolutely everything our entire lives?”

  “Of course not!”

  I took a deep breath. “Just how bad is this situation, Terry?”

  “Bad. Very bad.”

  The long and the short of it was that there was nothing left. The property was in Terry’s name and he’d remortgaged it years ago to open two new bars in the city. Those bars, along with all of “our” others, had been doing dreadfully – which, of course, I’d known, but Terry had kept the details from me and I hadn’t asked for them. I was too busy doing stuff like scrubbing puke from carpets when everyone had the vomiting bug and dividing never-ending laundry into the correct baskets to stop and ask for details – they’d just be yet another thing to worry about and I was all used up on that front. Besides, I believed it would all work out. I had to believe it.