Further Under the Duvet (17 page)

‘Didn’t she win already?’ Murmurry voices wafted towards me from the furthest reaches. ‘Isn’t that the same girl as last time?’ ‘How did she win again?’ ‘Something’s not right.’

But my card was verified and found to be correct. My prizes arrived – two more bottles of wine and another poinsettia and, just like the previous time, I received them with a gracious three-sixty smile. But nothing happened.

‘They didn’t clap,’ I said quietly to Himself.

‘You’re lucky they didn’t boo,’ he replied.

Then the fuss died down, another game started, other people won, we clapped enthusiastically when they were presented with their prizes – basically we all moved on with our lives. Until about four cards later, Rita-Anne suddenly appeared to be in distress. ‘Oh Christ,’ she whimpered. ‘I’ve only one number to go. Twenty-one.’

Dad stared at her aghast, like she’d done it on purpose, just in time to hear the caller shout, ‘Key to the door, twenty-one!’

There was a stricken moment, when we had a panicky silent eye-conference. What should we do? Pretend it hadn’t happened and let someone else win? But as Rita-Anne later admitted, she was just too competitive. ‘Check!’ she called.

This time the news was greeted with a nasty little oh-yeah?-style laugh. In fairness, though, when Rita-Anne was presented with her prizes – two more bottles of wine, a side of smoked salmon, a box of Roses, a box of biscuits (not Rover) and another poinsettia – they did clap – even if it was a
slow
handclap.

Blushing furiously, she put her poinsettia on the floor beside the others; in numbers of two or more they really did look sort of nasty, as though they were about to take over the world. Stressed and mortified, Rita-Anne wanted to open the box of Roses, but I persuaded her not to – we were unpopular enough without enjoying the fruits of our ridiculous luck under all their noses.

Then a new game started up and Dad whispered hoarsely around the table, ‘Don’t fecking win any more!’

We promised we wouldn’t and Mam said anxiously, ‘I hope they won’t do us over in the car park later. I’d like to take one of them poinsettias home.’

We got through the rest of the night without winning anything else – although it came terrifyingly close a couple of times – and enough other people won to almost obscure our disproportionate luck. Then it was time for the end-of-night raffle and the man called out, ‘It’s a pale blue ticket, number seventy-five. Number seventy-five. Anyone? Anyone at all?’

Susan suddenly noticed something on the table in front of her. ‘Oh Jesus,’ she said. ‘That’s me.’

Previously unpublished.

Villa-itis
. n.
The fear, while trapped with your entire family in a villa just outside Cannes, of running out of bread
.

It started even before we left. About a week before the off my mother rang me and she sounded anxious.

‘You know when we’re in that house in the south of France? Shouldn’t we organize some sort of kitty?’

This baffled me because the one thing you can say about my family is that we pay our way. In fact, it can almost get ugly. There were going to be ten adults and two children in the house for the week and everyone was going to be trying their hardest not just to ‘stand their round’ grocerically speaking, but to be the first to do so. I reminded Mammy Keyes of this but she refused to be mollified. ‘What if I come down for my breakfast and someone’s eaten all my bread and I can’t make toast?’

Then I understood. She didn’t mean a kitty, she meant self-determination over food. Kind of understandable: my family are all adults now, used to living on our own or with a small number of other people, whom we can monitor, hawk-eyed, to make sure they stay away from our bread. Suddenly we were going to be thrust into a situation with
several other hungry people and it would be a hard job to track them all.

But what was Mammy K proposing? Everyone getting a shelf in the French fridge for their own food, like in a flatshare? Even putting little notes on things? ‘Tadhg’s butter. It’s been weighed!’ Or (when in Rome) ‘Les Müller Corners de Marian. Ne touchez pas!’

I tried to jolly her along with talk that it would all work itself out. But clearly she wasn’t convinced because a rumour reached me that, along with her sundresses, sandals, sun-cream, etc., she was planning to bring a sliced pan in her suitcase. Allegedly (according to my source) she would keep said bread under lock and key for the week, only opening the vault once a day, to retrieve two slices to carry downstairs for her breakfast toast. She would swagger past all the hungry hordes who were too proud or too foolish to think ahead like she had, saunter into the kitchen, approach the toaster and make toast. When I confronted her, she would neither confirm nor deny it. But when I made mention of my nephew Luka’s fondness for OPT (Other People’s Toast – it is as ambrosia to him, rendered unbearably delicious by the fact of belonging to someone else) and that she wouldn’t be able to resist giving it to him, because no one can refuse him anything ever, I could see her doing mental calculations, to see if she would have enough slices to bring down an extra one each day for Luka. Evidently the sums added up because her brow cleared and the serene ‘I’ve got my own bread’ expression resumed residence on her face.

Anyway, on a Saturday in early September, twelve of us
descended on a beautiful house just outside Cannes. We came from all three corners of the globe – Prague, where my brother lives with his wife, Ljiljana, and their two children, New York where my sister Caitríona lives and Dublin where the rest of us reside.

We got through the first night’s dinner without any mention of bread because the caretaker had prepared us a dinner so delicious that we were distracted. Then the following morning, Himself and myself saddled up to go to
le super-marché
to buy supplies for the twelve of us. Everyone had special requests – goat’s cheese, drinking chocolate, Special K bars, blackcurrant Winders (that was me) – but even in these carb-phobic times, bread was the one common thread. It was what everyone wanted. It made sense: we were self-catering and as (apart from Ljiljana) we’re not the kind of family who ‘rustles’ things up – blanching peppers and making our own balsamic vinegar dressing and preparing a ‘delicious, light lunch’ in fifteen minutes – bread was vital. We could make cheese sangwidges. We could make hang sangwidges. We could make cheese
and
hang sangwidges. Sure, you wouldn’t even need a plate. Leaving for le super-marché, I was badly jostled at the front door as everyone insisted on giving me money to pay for le shopping. (‘
I’ll
get it.’ ‘No,
I’ll
get it.’ ‘Je… moi… le… ah feck it, I’ll get it.’) Festooned with banknotes like an Afghan bride, I left. (Is it Afghan I’m thinking of? Maybe it’s Uzbek? Or Armenian?) Just before the car turned out onto the road an upstairs window opened and a disembodied voice called, ‘Get some bread!’

We bought four loaves, which seemed like enough for one
day – after all we would be going to le supermarché or even la boulangerie
chaque jour
. Then we came home and a lovely, casual day unfolded. People sunbathed, swam, shoved each other off lilos and wandered in and out of the kitchen for their lunch sangwidges whenever they felt like it. (Me? I usually like my lunch around 10.45.)

But sometime in the early afternoon, Dad rushed out of the kitchen, stood at the top of the steps that descended to the garden and, like a general returning with news of an unexpected and dreadful defeat in battle, wailed at the prone bodies by the pool, ‘All the bread is gone!’

I was mortified! It had been my responsibility to buy enough bread and I hadn’t. Dad assembled a pitiful repast of Special K bars, goat’s cheese and blackcurrant Winders and although he made the best of it, he was obviously upset.

But later, in the admittedly large kitchen, I stumbled across an almost full baguette hidden beneath a tea towel. Further investigation revealed another loaf – hello? – in the bread-bin. And half a brioche on the draining board.

But the damage – or
damage
– had been done. We were all in the grip of a hysteria, a terror of running out.

The following day more people went on the official trip to le supermarché and bought
five
loaves. Then Niall and Tadhg arrived home from golf bearing several eight-foot-long baguettes. Five minutes later Dad appeared – he’d been missing all morning – apparently he’d walked the three kilometres into the centre of Cannes and he too was laden with bread.

We had far too much, but it still wasn’t enough. It was as though we had become blind to what was really there and
the acquisition was the only thing that was important. (Some kind of metaphor about life there, if I could only be arsed to pursue it.)

The following day the situation reached its high-water mark. I wasn’t there (in the spa in Hotel Martinez, another story) but apparently Dad did a reprise of his general returning with news of defeat act. There was NO BREAD!

Ljiljana, demonstrating she is more than worthy of her title, The Most Fabulous Woman On The Planet™, offered to
bake
bread. For some reason she happened to have a packet of bread-mix about her person. And I returned, reeking of lavender oil, to the bizarre sight of Ljiljana, in a kitchen that seemed to be heaving with bread,
baking bread
.

I have since discovered that it’s not just that my family are insane, although of course they are, but that this fear of running out is a ‘villa thing’. A syndrome that has something to do with displacement and temporary lack of domestic autonomy. My friend Shoshana went to a villa in Spain with her family and experienced an almost identical situation with bread. People were actually hoarding the stuff, she said, even though they had so much bread they had run out of cupboard space and had taken to stacking it on the floor. Then one day she and her mother went on a trip to Gibraltar and discovered the local branch of Marks and Spencer. Despite being surrounded by Marks and Spencers at home, they got very excited. (This is a holiday feature for me, too – shops that I can visit any time I like at home suddenly seem Aladdin’s Caves of wondrousness.) What could be nicer, they thought, than to buy Marks and Spencer sandwiches for everyone? All of a doodah they hurried home and exclaimed, ‘M&S sangers
all round!’ The others stretched to see over the uneaten columns of bread and gave grateful thanks that now there was something to eat for lunch.

A version of this was first published in
Cara,
August 2004
.

I was never very good at birthdays. On my eighteenth I was wretched at the speed at which my life was slipping through my fingers. Again on my twenty-sixth. And as for when I turned thirty, I was so distraught I might as well have been two
thousand
and thirty.

The problem was that, like most people, my image of myself is frozen in time at some young age (I’m nineteen) and I’m still deciding what I’ll do when I leave school. I still feel ‘young’ – although I admit that genuine ‘young’ people would find such sentiments risible. But, in my defence, I vaguely covet Hello Kitty toasters, I get complicated highlights, and when they launched KitKat Chunky, I was genuinely excited.

So on that reckoning, my fortieth birthday – traditionally regarded as the gateway to a twilit half-life of elasticated waistbands and gardening – should have been a total blood-bath. Next stop death…

But not any more!

Because forty isn’t what it used to be. Forty – just in case you hadn’t heard – is the new thirty. Several friends ‘crossed over’ this year and most of them look and behave like women ten years their junior. (Vitamins? Positive attitude? Botox? Whatever it is, it works.) One recommenced smoking after several abstinent years because forty felt so young! Another
got engaged – her first time; as she said with magnificent hauteur, ‘Getting engaged is a big deal. Not something you want to rush into.’

Forty had been rehabilitated and, actually, so had I. From thirty-one onwards, having brokered a fragile peace with myself, birthdays had been less of an angst-fest, and as my big day neared I was swaggering about, boasting that being forty wouldn’t bother me at all. I might even – perish the thought – have said, ‘Age? Hah! Merely a number.’ (Mind you, I’d been in training, mentally preparing myself, since turning thirty-seven.) But clearly I was only showing off because on the morning itself the realization hit me like a sack of wet sand falling from a height – I was FORTY, I was
ancient
. How had all this time passed without my noticing? Where had my life gone?

If it hadn’t been for my family and my presents waiting for me downstairs, I would probably still be in bed now, staring at the ceiling, paralysed with despair.

The only thing that helped was my appearance. The previous day as a thirty-something I’d despaired over how I looked, but now that I was
in my forties
I found myself thinking, actually, I’m not that bad.

Then the hiccup passed and it was business as usual and I realized how disappointed I was – all my life I’ve been waiting for that glorious moment when I arrive at the top of the mountain and finally become an adult. In that instant I would suddenly be able to ask taxi drivers to turn down their ear-drum-hurting Def Leppard tapes and to tell my hairdresser that he doesn’t blow-dry my fringe properly and to ask him to go over it again without feeling wretched with
guilt. I had hung a lot of hope on the idea that turning forty would miraculously effect this change; but nope, I was still a nineteen-year-old trapped in a forty-year-old body, way too fond of Claire’s Accessories and still getting spots.

Then something happened…

It was this. I’ve always dreaded confrontation. Even when I’ve been in the right and I should have hotly defended myself, I’ve swallowed back the words, destroying the lining of my stomach and giving my incipient ulcer a shot in the arm.

But about a week after my big day, I was talking to an old friend; someone I’m very fond of, except for her obsession with weight. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just her own, but she’s very fixated on others’, scornful when they put it on and jealous when they lose it. Whenever we meet, I can actually feel her
weighing
me but I’ve never confronted her, because that’s just not what I do. Anyway, she was talking about how she’d knocked the Twixes on the head and how thin and powerful she was feeling, when suddenly, without warning, a red mist descended and, from far away, almost like I was listening to someone else, I heard myself telling her off. I listened attentively. I believe I told her that she was entirely wrong to judge people on their tubbiness instead of qualities like kindness, generosity and sense of humour. (I said ‘people’ but, of course, I really meant me.)