Since then, Diary, my summer has been punctuated with nights over at Cliff and Damo’s. They never seem to mind me hanging out there as much as I do, which probably isn’t surprising when you consider the amount of people who live in their house to begin with.
As for Terry, he really has his feet under the table at our place already – Mum slash Susie’s not happy unless he’s over at our place at least three times a week and he’s lapping it up. We had a really embarrassing conversation recently where she said how happy she was that I’d met someone.
“It’s just great altogether. I know we’ve been very protective of you and your brothers over the years,” she said, pausing for just a split second after she said “brothers”, “so I know you haven’t had the opportunity to meet someone before this. The three of you didn’t get a quarter of the freedom that other kids your age did, but it was only because we were trying to keep you safe.
“Maybe we were wrong . . . I don’t know. I always thought we were doing the best thing for the three of you by protecting you from the world, but after what happened to Ricky, I don’t know any more.”
“I know you were only trying to do your best,” I said. I traced a pattern with my foot on the threadbare carpet. We didn’t really do heart-to-hearts and I didn’t know where to look.
“We were, but I know it’s meant you don’t have many friends, male or female. And parents of an eighteen-year-old girl usually spend all of their time gluing their daughter’s legs together.”
“Would you have preferred it if I’d got up the duff at twelve like all the rest of the young ones around here?”
I’d done everything right over the years and now I was getting hassle for not being a skirt lifter!
“No, no, of course not. What I’m saying is I know you’ve had to make sacrifices along the way and I’m glad you’ve met someone nice despite all that. Just don’t get up the duff, seeing as you brought that up.”
The weird thing is, though, I don’t think Cliff likes Terry one bit. He won’t tell me why as such, he just says he finds him creepy.
“Any time I see the pair of you together he’s glued to your arm,” was all he’d say, which I didn’t think was much of an argument as to why someone could be considered creepy. Oh well, it’s early days with Terry and who knows, it could all be over this time next week, so I’m not getting too worried about Cliff’s opinion. He’s entitled to it anyway, when all’s said and done.
So that’s where I’m at these days . . . I have to run now, Diary, because I’m going to meet Cliff and Damo. It’s another night in the culchie club for us and I can’t wait!
Chapter 23
“Oh! Look, Damien’s over there,” Sammy said.
I looked. Jesus! so he was. It might have been years, but I recognised him instantly. He still looked tall, as tall people tended to, still had a rugged country look about him, still looked . . . like a guard. Oh, and gorgeous. Exceptionally so. My stomach lurched at the sight of him.
“Just like that?” I raised my eyebrows. “He just happened to walk in here?”
Sammy waved in Damien’s direction. “I mentioned we’d be in here if he wanted to join us for a drink later . . .”
“But you didn’t mention your mention to me?”
I involuntarily flicked my grown-out fringe – all twenty strands or so that were left since I started the post-baby moulting – from one side of my head to the other, then remembered too late that it usually looked like an old man’s comb-over that way. God, he was almost at our table. There wasn’t so much as a flicker of recognition in his eyes as he glanced at me. He must have thought I hadn’t turned up and Sammy had met another friend instead.
A deep, burning shame overwhelmed me as I imagined myself through Damien’s eyes. I was several stone overweight and well aware of it, but I’d done nothing about it for a long time. Having children wasn’t an excuse. Eat less, move more and you lose the weight regardless of whether you have no children or twenty of them. I’d eaten more and moved less and let my fat cells multiply like bacteria in a school experiment.
The hair? Well, that wasn’t my fault, but I still couldn’t help being mortified at looking like the character Andy in Little Britain. The strain of the last few months was evident every time I looked in the mirror and no amount of make-up would hide it tonight – and I’d laughed half of my make-up off anyway from being in Sammy’s company. I must have looked like a wreck, old before my time and swathed in layers of suffocating fat. But there wasn’t much I could do about it at that moment. I lifted my head and smiled as Damien approached, hoping I looked a lot more confident in myself than I felt.
I stood up and extended my hand. I knew instantly that I shouldn’t have – what was this, a job interview? – but I could hardly drop my hand and sit back down now.
“Good to see you, Damien,” I said when I’d grabbed his hand and shaken it vigorously.
He smiled politely. “Please, call me Damo.”
Sammy laughed. “Our parents used to get such a kick out of that. Damo, will you get the drinks in there for us before we die of thirst? And whatever you’re having yourself.”
Damien – Damo – hadn’t taken two steps before Sammy started up.
“So?” Sammy gave me a questioning look.
“So what?” I remained impassive.
“Just – so? Anything to say about anything?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, Sammy.”
“Course you don’t.”
I sighed. “I’ve just left my husband, for God’s sake . . .”
I’m not sure what she saw in my face, but it was enough to make her hold her hands up.
“Okay, okay.”
“We’re not eighteen any more, Sammy.”
“More’s the pity. Sorry, you’re right. I’m always inappropriate when I’m drinking.”
“Just when you’re drinking?”
“I’m getting better with that. You learn fast when you become a mother, don’t you? The things I’ve discovered include that nobody wants to be asked why their baby is such a fatso when his parents are slim. Or be told it’s no wonder everyone thinks someone’s three-year-old son is a daughter with a dodgy taste in clothes if they won’t cut his baby curls off. I must be the only mother ever barred from a mother-and-baby group on her first visit.”
She rolled her eyes as she looked up at the bar. “Look at Damien ordering sparkling water. He’s on a health and fitness kick at the moment and it’s such a pain in the arse. He won’t even touch a drop of booze any more. It’s all ‘No, I’m getting up at five to go the gym,’ with him now.”
“Terrible carry-on, Sammy. What is he thinking? That it’ll keep him trim or something?” I grabbed a handful of fat on my stomach. “Ah, he’s lost the plot. Why would you want to be doing something like that to your body?”
Sammy laughed uproariously as Damo returned with his sparkling water and another round for Sammy and me.
We got all the predictables out of the way in the first hour or so. Damo asked me about the kids and I politely replied to all of his queries. Yes, four was a good few all right and yes, the gap between the first two really was rather big. No, it didn’t keep me young to have three young children nipping at my heels.
Damo somehow, rather skilfully actually, managed to avoid mentioning Terry. I suppose I could have mentioned him if I’d wanted to, but I hadn’t. Of course I hadn’t. If I had anything left to bet, I’d have put it on the sure and certain fact that Sammy had told him what little she knew anyway whether he wanted to know or not.
I asked him about his job and hoped I smiled and nodded in the right places at the boring bits. Damo evidently still really loved his job. I asked him about his parents and really listened.
And then Sammy’s phone rang.
“Ah no. It’s home. What has he lost now?”
She answered it, shouted into the phone for a few seconds with one hand over her free ear, then got up and tottered to the front d
oor. Damn her husband. I’d go home and find whatever he’d lost for him myself rather than have to think of something to say to Damo now.
“Sorry to hear you and Terry broke up.”
“Oh, thanks. Yeah, well, what can you do? That’s life. These things happen, I suppose.”
A cliché hat-trick. Brilliant.
“All you can do is believe they happen for a reason, or even for the best,” Damo said.
I felt a bit better now. Clichés were just a universal language we all spoke, after all. Either that or we both had shit conversational skills, but at least I wasn’t alone.
“It’d be nice to think so, but I have a feeling my children wouldn’t agree with that.”
Damo nodded. “Yes, it’s always the children you have to think of in tricky situations.” He traced the condensation on his sparkling water glass. “Been to any good sale of works recently, Holly?”
Oh, lovely. I could run with that. I smiled as I remembered the sale of work I’d gone to in Offaly with Damo and his family.
“They’re thin on the ground, Damo,” I proclaimed sorrowfully. “I’ve gone to the odd car boot sale over the last while, but they’re a poor relation, no doubt about it.”
“I went to something in the States that was advertised as being a car boot sale but turned out to be a sale of nothing but ceramic figurine dogs. The freakiest thing was that they’d all been broken and the idea was that you left with your own totally unique figurine dog. I mean, I understood it for the nodding dogs, but . . .”
“You did?”
“Well, at least you could somehow piece them back together, but the ceramic ones . . . the world’s gone mad.”
And then, through the fog of alcohol, I realised that of course Damo wasn’t going to bring up what happened years ago. Precisely for that reason – it was years ago. Why would he care now? How stupid I was to think for even a second that it would be important enough to him now to bring it up.
Not long after Sammy returned, Damo announced that he had to leave.
“What?” Sammy looked at her watch. “It’s only half nine!”
“I’ve a 6 a.m. kick-boxing class in the gym tomorrow,” he said as he put on his coat. “Lovely to see you again, Holly.”
“You too, Damo.”
I fixed a smile on my face until he was out of sight.
“You see what I mean? He’s only in the door and he’s running off again!”
“He’s only going to the gym, Sammy. There’s nothing strange about that.”
“He’s changed his entire lifestyle and I’d like to know why. This whole health kick thing . . . And he’s living in this super trendy apartment block and bought a new car recently that isn’t his type of car at all . . .”
“People are allowed to change, you know.”
“But why does he want to? It’s like he’s running away from himself.”
“It sounds like he’s had a hard time recently from what you told me. People have different ways of dealing with things.”
Sammy spent the rest of our round complaining about Damo, while I tried to calm myself without making it obvious I needed to calm down in the first place. Seeing Damo after all this time had been excruciating and wonderful at the same time. Things could have been so different . . .
Chapter 24
“You need to pretend you’ve had an affair with a footballer,” Sammy said. “Channel someone like Rebecca Loos. Remember – that model who had an affair with David Beckham?”
“Sammy, I’m ridiculously overweight. What footballer would have me?”
“Ah, they’re not picky.”
“Cheers.”
“No, no! I didn’t mean it that way! I just meant . . . well, affairs are all about getting a bit of the auld strange, aren’t they?”
“I wouldn’t know. Ask Terry.”
Sammy squirmed. “Ah, Holly, I’m sorry. That was thoughtless. I’ll shut up.”
“No, go on. You can’t make me feel much worse at this point,re anyway.”
I smiled to let Sammy know I wasn’t taking her words personally. She had a knack of saying something innocently and making it sound like she was the most insulting person on the planet, but I knew her ways by now – even if I was slightly out of practice with them. It was fantastic though how, despite all this time and so much happening, it was as if we’d always stayed friends.
“Well, my point is, it doesn’t really matter who it comes from or how overweight they are – sex is sex to those who cheat. And you’re not ridiculously overweight, Holly. Honestly. And I’m not just saying that because if you are, that means I am, too.”
“I’m just a bit chubby so, am I?”
“You’re just . . . well-prepared for the cold weather, that’s all. We both are. Besides, with a face like yours, it wouldn’t matter even if you were – you’re still gorgeous.”
“You have to say that. You’re my friend. Even if you keep saying the wrong thing.”
“Foot-in-mouth syndrome, as always. It’s got worse since I had the kids, too. I’m too tired to think about the most respectful way to make my point.”
“I’d prefer a straight-talker any day to someone who always tells you what you want to hear. I don’t think you should be selling being the other woman to me though, even in a pretend world, after what’s gone on with me recently.”
“Ah, I know. I was only joking. But seriously, check out if the captain of the Irish football team is single and if he is, it’d do no harm to send a rumour floating around the Eire TV canteen about you and him . . .”
“No footballers, single or otherwise. But if you have any other ideas, I’d like to hear them.”
“How about you make a shocking statement? You know how it is – there’s always some so-called celeb or other on the front of the national tabloids saying something completely inconsequential, but as long as there’s a headline in it, you’re laughing. You could make up something like you’ve sworn off sex forever. They’d love that.”
“I can see it now: ‘Diary of a Celibate’. I can’t see people buying a paper because of it, though. My non-existent sex life really isn’t that interesting – and I wouldn’t be making that up. I can’t see myself being with another man for a very long time, if ever.”
“I’ll give you a few months, Holly. I know Terry’s destroyed your life and everything – believe me, I get it and I’m sympathetic – but still, you can’t keep a good girl down.”
“I can’t keep my weight down either, so as previously mentioned, I don’t think anybody’s going to be queuing up to drag me out of my celibacy. I’m afraid I’m not one for the shocking statements, Sammy, so we’ll have to scrap that idea, too. Anything else?”
“Why don’t you see if you can get on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here?”
“Erm . . . because I’m missing one vital criterion.”
“Oh, they won’t be biased against you just because you don’t live in the UK.”
“Sammy! The criterion is that I’m not a celebrity!”
“Your problem, Holly, is that you don’t think big. I might be a dreamer, but if you don’t dream, you don’t get.”
“Trying to think myself into being a celebrity – not that I’m doing that – wouldn’t make me one.”
“Are you forgetting how high-profile your husband has made himself over the years? He even went on that Saturday night chat show talking about how he made it big, remember? By proxy, you’re a known face too, whether you want to be or not. I saw so much about you and what was going on in your life even though we weren’t in contact any more. Put it this way, if there was an Irish Big Brother and you applied for it, they’d snap you up.”
“If I’m so famous, how come Luke couldn’t get any gigs for me within Eire TV and I had to go on Kelvin’s show to get publicity? No, Sammy. People just aren’t interested in me and to be honest, I like it that way. If I didn’t have to try to make money there’s no way I’d be putting myself out there like this. You
know that. Any other suggestions?”
“Have you tried getting a part in an ad? Let me think, what could you advertise . . . ? You like butter, don’t you?”
“Since when am I an actress?”
“How much acting has to be done in a fifteen-second ad, when you think about it?”
I sighed. “Do you know what, I think it’s time for a cup of tea.”
“Tea. That’s it! I can just see you in an ad for tea, I really can! You need to make a few calls, Holly. All right, we’ll have a quick tea break and then I want you on that phone immediately.”
My phone rang. Sammy and I looked at each other.
“Freaky,” she said as I answered.
“Holly, it’s Luke. I’ve got you a gig on another of our productions if you’re interested. There’ll be a few quid involved.”
I covered the mouthpiece.
“Sammy, do you fancy moving in? I think you might be bringing me luck.”
Chapter 25
17 July 1994
Guess where I’m just back from! Clue: it’s one of those places you hear about but never think you’ll have a reason to go there . . . No, not Casablanca or Madagascar, you eejit – Offaly! (I’m joking. No offence, Diary, if you were printed in Offaly or something.) When Damo said on Friday night that we should have a piss-up in Offaly the next day just for a laugh, Cliff and I looked at each other as if Damo had suggested we examine crocodile tonsils.
“My parents would love to meet some of my friends from up here,” he said, looking confused at our lack of enthusiasm.
“But . . . we’ve never been to Offaly before,” I said.
“All the more reason to go, then!”
“Won’t your parents mind having people they don’t know staying in their house?”
“Not at all. My parents’ house is like a bus station and that’s the way they like it. You should come down with me tomorrow.”
“You know, he’s right,” Cliff said. “It’ll be good craic. And before you say anything about money, I’ve loads from doing overtime last week. Let’s go!”
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