Locked Out of Heaven

by Shirley Benton

  “I have a feeling Zara’s going to be calling in sick tomorrow,” Paul said as we made our way back to the safety of the Eire TV studios, all thoughts of going to our estate abandoned for now.

  Chapter 11

  I was glad to get home after a very strange day. I reflected on the madness as I weaved through lanes of traffic. The initial interview had gone okay, I suppose. They’d asked me about Terry, which was inevitable, and I’d trotted out the lines I’d prepared in my head about him. I hadn’t expected them to ask me if there had been anyone else since him, though – I’d only left him a few weeks ago! I told them there hadn’t been, although I suppose strictly speaking, that wasn’t 100 per cent true.

  A few days after I left Terry, I accidentally clicked an ad on Facebook that led me to a free dating site. Although I was quite sure I’d never be interested in dating anyone ever again, I was going out of my mind thinking about everything that had happened and out of pure badness, I created an account. There, Terry, I thought to myself as I browsed pictures of people I had no interest in ever meeting.

  It killed an hour or so that night, so the following night, when I was going out of my head thinking murderous thoughts about my ex, I went on it again just to distract myself. I found myself fascinated by the stories behind the profiles – who were all of these people? Were they people like me, who needed to do something to kill time instead of wanting to kill a person? Were they actually lonely people who believed they might find what they were looking for at the other end of a keyboard? Were they bored husbands whose wives were downstairs sorting out their children’s laundry?

  I hadn’t put up my picture, which is why I got a message at all. In fact, my entire profile was fake – a product of the first things that came into my head, written just to have an account so that I could look at these people. They were my kind, you see, even if I didn’t actually want to meet them. They were people who were alone, too – bar the married ones. Just being around kindred spirits was enough. But someone liked the fake me – a guy called “Quite a Catch”. Indeed. When he sent me a personal message, I wrote back a load of guff and quite enjoyed it. I never expected to hear from him again, but within a few minutes, there was another message from him.

  This went on for a few nights and even though I had no intention of ever actually meeting him, it started to become an amusing interlude in my otherwise stressful day. Then he asked me if I’d send a picture of myself. So I did the thing I knew was guaranteed to send him on his merry way – I sent him one of my fat pics. You know, those fridge pics you take of yourself in a tight white T-shirt that shows up every lump and bump? Yep, one of those. But didn’t the fecker come back to me ten minutes later saying how lovely I was and did I want to meet up!

  I instantly dismissed him as a piss-taker. In fact, I got quite riled about it. How dare this person take the piss out of the fat bird! I said to myself and sent him a message telling him as much. He wrote back such a heart-rending message that I felt like the world’s biggest bitch in a way other than size after reading it. He was big himself and would never take the piss out of anyone, he said. Why would he, when he’d spent his whole life being the one whose piss was taken out of him, drop by drop? He was very upset that he’d hurt me and would like to meet up and sort it out face to face.

  So out of guilt more so than anything else, I agreed to meet him. My first reaction when I saw him – Frank was his name, by the way – was that he hadn’t been lying when he said he was overweight too, but that was okay. The introductions were nervous and cringeworthy on both parts, but that was to be expected. Wasn’t that what this whole thing was all about? As we sat down to dinner – what else for the pair of us? – I started to look forward to an evening of witty repartee once the wine started to flow down our gullets.

  The wine flowed, but the conversation didn’t. In fact, we talked about nothing for the entire night except Frank’s jobs. He was a man of many careers, it transpired. None of them seemed to be of the permanent variety.

  “I’m still trying to work out what I want to do with my life,” he said on more than one occasion.

  As he listed his back catalogue of jobs, I couldn’t help thinking he had very little options left to explore. A discussion about the pros and cons of working as a full-time pooper scooper finished me off, though. For your information, the main pro is that you sometimes find money – but the main con is that it’s usually been shat on. After that, all I was worried about was how much this night was going to cost me in wine and how soon I could wrap it up. After that night, I knew there would be no further forays into the dating world for quite some time.

  The team on the show had also asked me to root out pictures of me when I was young, which would be shown intermittently throughout my opening sequence. When I finally had all the kids in bed sometime around midnight, I took out a suitcase and searched in the lining until I found what I was looking for – a shabby folder of photos and letters. They’d lived in the lining of this suitcase for a long time and I never looked at them. I had no choice but to do so now, though, it seemed. I couldn’t ask Susie or Willie to look through them and take out the childhood photos of me without upsetting them.

  My breathing grew shallow as I looked through the photos. Me with Ricky and Cliff when I was five. Me on my own in a school photo, looking freckled and gap-toothed. Me with Sammy and Damo O’Brien, my former best friends.

  Sammy was the only true friend I’d ever had. Our backgrounds had been totally different, but we’d clicked from the second we first met. I was an inner-city girl, albeit a sheltered one who could really be from anywhere because I was barely let outside the front door, and she was from a very rural background – a culchie, as we fondly describe country people where I come from. Then we’d fallen out in spectacular style when things had gone wrong between her brother, Damo, and me. Over the years, I’d wondered how life had treated her.

  I sat on the bed, staring into space and remembering. I would have looked her up before if it hadn’t been for Terry. I knew he wouldn’t approve if I became friendly with Sammy again. It would mean Damo had a gateway into my life again if he wanted one – he probably wouldn’t, but Terry wouldn’t see it that way – and the whole thing would only cause trouble.

  But given what Terry had done, none of that really mattered any more . . .

  I selected a few childhood pictures and packed the folder back into the suitcase. As I put the photos back, my hand brushed off the diary in the lining of the suitcase. It was like a physical bolt to touch it after all this time. Even though I’d always known it was there, I’d never dared read through it again in case the memories overwhelmed me. And that was when I’d thought things were fine, so now, of all times, wasn’t the time to read it.

  So it made no sense when I suddenly found myself pulling it out. Maybe it would help to read it . . . how could it possibly make things any worse? And besides, Ricky’s spirit was everywhere now that I was living at home. He was never mentioned directly and yet his presence was ubiquitous.

  Just as I was about to get into bed with the diary, my phone beeped. It was a message from Terry:

  According to the grapevine you’re doing some filming with Eire TV. Is this true?

  I ignored it.

  Ten minutes later, the phone rang. Terry. I let it go to voicemail.

  A minute later, the phone beeped again:

  You have one new voice message in your mailbox.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Terry!”

  I prodded the screen to select voicemail and put the message on speaker. I didn’t want Terry’s rotten voice booming into my ear. Plus, if he was giving out to me, with a bit of luck Susie might hear and tip Terry off his pedestal.

  Holly, I don’t know what you’re up to, but Laurie has told everyone in Sorrento Hill that you’re doing something for Eire TV. Whatever it is, you should have had the decency to let me know before the rest of the world did. What are you playing at? You on TV – seriously? Call me as
soon as you get this.

  I took ten minutes to regulate my breathing before texting back:

  Yes, Terry – me on TV. I’ve signed up for a show called Diary of a Boomeranger.

  He rang straight away. I switched the phone to silent.

  The screen lit up thirty seconds later.

  Why would you do something so incredibly stupid?

  I couldn’t help but reply:

  Stupid, how? Afraid that your secret life might come out?

  Seconds later:

  Don’t do this, Holly. I know you’re angry at me, but this isn’t the way to get revenge.

  Typical, typical Terry. Everything was always about him.

  My fingers moved furiously as I typed:

  This is about surviving, not revenge. We’re absolutely penniless.

  You know I never meant for this to happen, Holly.

  Enough.

  It doesn’t matter any more. I’m moving forwards. For the record, I’ll be saying we split up because you had an affair. If you want to keep the truth hidden, you’d better stick to that story.

  I turned off the phone immediately. I repeated to myself what I’d said when I signed up for the show – that the only person with more to lose than I did if the truth came out was Terry. He’d keep his counsel and I’d keep my business to myself.

  And tomorrow, I would look up Sammy.

  Chapter 12

  4 March 1994

  Well hello, Diary. I believe you’ve been expecting me. For . . . em . . . a couple of months. March is the new January, right? I never saw myself as a diary person before – that’s more my brother Ricky’s type of thing, really. It’ll come as no surprise, then, to hear that he’s the one who bought you for my birthday – what am I saying, you already know that – duh! As you can tell, I’m not the bright one in our family. I’ll give you one guess who is.

  I suppose you want to know a bit about your owner. Okay, so, but you might be sorry you asked. I’m from Blackbeg. Now, knowing Ricky, he probably bought you in that nice store in town on the other side of the river where he buys all of his stationery, stuff he’s saved up all of his pocket money for. He likes to go there because it reminds him that there’s a world outside Blackbeg. If you’ve never heard of my homeland, I’m sorry to say that it’s a big comedown for you now to be a resident of my neck of the woods. I mentioned where I’m from before anything else because unfortunately, it’s what seems to define me more than anything else in life.

  Blackbeg – brace yourself – is the kind of place that causes parents to cover their children’s ears if its name is mentioned and is the country’s black spot for every type of problem you can imagine. Greatest percentage of unemployed people? Yep, that’d be us. Highest suicide rate? Check. Biggest crime rate? Roll up, roll up! And, of course, the largest percentage of drug users in any area of the country. And boy, am I starting to know just how spot on that statement is. That’s why I’ve turned to you. I need something to try to help me to make sense of what’s happening.

  It’s Ricky, you see. I bet you thought he was a sweetheart from what I said about him before, didn’t you? And you’d have been right – he was. Recently, everything’s changed.

  Ricky has always been the joker of the family, as I suppose you have to be with a name like Richard Richards. My mother has the most childish sense of humour in the world and nobody thought the name was a good idea except my equally childish father. Ricky’s the last person you’d expect to be mixed up with drugs. My parents may have had dodgy taste in names, but they’re otherwise brilliant when it comes to looking out for us and giving us the best possible futures, despite our postal code.

  When Ricky and my other brother, Cliff, and I were kids . . . Yes, Cliff! I swear, I’m not lying! I’ll photocopy his birth cert and stick it in here, if you like! I, by the way, am called Holly, because my mother thought I looked grumpy and prickly when I was born. I think she’d lost her sense of humour by the third labour. Anyway, when we were kids, they’d sit us down every night after school and spend hours doing homework with us, testing us on what we’d learned and reading ahead in our school books so that we’d be prepared for what was to come over the next few days. They were determined that we’d get the best education they could possibly give us in a bid to get us out of Blackbeg when we grew up. Even as kids, though, Cliff and I knew Ricky was the brains of the operation. If any of us were ever going to go places, it’d be him.

  Over the years, Ricky was bullied for being such a swot in a school full of no-hopers, but he never let it get to him – if anything, every taunt seemed to spur him on to study even more. He got top marks in the class in his Inter Cert, and he went into Fifth and Sixth Year determined to get straight As in all subjects in the Leaving Cert. We’re both doing our Leaving Certificate this year, because Ricky had to stay back a year when he was younger owing to illness.

  I’ve applied for Commerce in University College Dublin, but I don’t really know if I even want to do it. Mum and Dad are just adamant that I’ll go to college and I was under pressure to choose something. As for Ricky, he’s determined to get into Trinity College Dublin to study medicine. Nobody from where we lived was ever seen as having a hope of going to one of the most prestigious colleges in Europe. His determination to get out of Blackbeg has given me hope that I can do it, too.

  The older I get, the more depressing I find the place. You drive into our estate and see gangs skulking around the place looking for trouble, or teenagers shooting up in the park while kids play on a merry-go-round right beside them. And that’s good going compared to what goes on in the flats across the road from where we live.

  Mum took me over to the flats once to visit a sick old fella who used to be a friend of our now dead grandparents. I’ll never forget it. We walked in the entrance of one of the blocks of flats and met a group of hollow-eyed, strung-out kids. They were all either hanging out on the stairs or lying on the floor of the entrance area. One of them was pissing up against a wall, another was sitting down and vomiting between his knees.

  Mum grabbed my hand and made a run for it up the stairs. The ones who were sitting on the stairs shouted abuse at us. When we reached the top of the first flight, there was another one passed out with a needle jutting out of his arm.

  We kept going until we reached the auld fella’s flat on the third floor. When he eventually made it to the door and let us in, he barricaded the door behind us with about twenty locks to keep the addicts out. We stayed with the auld fella for about an hour and when Mum said it was time for us to go, I nearly died. I remember thinking about jumping out of the window rather than having to walk past the zombies again on the way out.

  She poked her head out of the door and when she heard nothing, she said her goodbyes to the auld fella and grabbed my hand. We dashed down the stairs with the sound of the auld fella bolting his door reverberating after us.

  The pack of zombies had moved on, even the one on the first floor who I’d thought might be dead, but their piss and puke was everywhere. We made it out of the front door and raced down the lane that would lead us to the main road as if our lives depended on it – and maybe they did. Mum and Dad had told us all about HIV and AIDS over the years as part of their efforts to keep us away from drugs, but I’d never really taken any notice of what they’d said about it before. Now, I was visualising getting a prick from a dirty needle and dying a gruesome death.

  “Mum, why do all the young ones in the flats have bingo faces?” I said to her in a breathless voice when we eventually reached the road.

  “What are you on about?” she said, trying to manoeuvre us across the road as fast as possible. There were cars coming, but running out in front of moving vehicles seemed like less of a risk than hanging out anywhere near the flats.

  When we finally got across and into the relative safety of our estate, I answered her.

  “They were only young but they looked about seventy, like the auld ones around here who meet over by the gree
n on Sunday nights when they’re waiting for the bingo bus.”

  “That’s what drugs do to a person, Holly. Do you want to look like those kids?”

  “Jaysus, no!”

  “Well then, let that be a lesson to you. Stay away from the drugs, love, whatever else you do in life. Those addicts will probably all be dead before they’re twenty.”

  Just after Christmas, Ricky started hanging around with a girl called Stacey. He met her on the bus back from town one Saturday. She’s from the next estate down from us but goes to a different school nearer to town. Next thing we knew, Ricky pretty much vanished out of our lives.

  On the rare occasions when he’s actually home, he spends more time under the stairs with the landline than he does with us. Still, it was good initially to see Ricky so happy – or so I thought. Mum and Dad weren’t quite as keen.

  “If he keeps hanging around with this one, he’ll lose interest in studying,” she ranted to Dad before going off to say a decade of the rosary.

  Mum and Dad are right Holy Joes. Dad said the best thing to do was to leave him alone, because the whole thing would probably fizzle out in a few weeks.

  He was wrong. The weeks have gone by and Stacey is still on the scene. Whenever Mum and Dad talk about the Leaving Cert now, Ricky seems to be lacking his usual enthusiasm for it and the opportunities it presents. Even more worrying is the fact that he’s really starting to look like shit and is as ratty as a bag of weasels. With every day that passes, he distances himself more from the rest of us. He never brings Stacey round to the house, but something happened earlier.