If This Is Paradise, I Want My Money Back (15 page)

‘Stop bringing Charlotte into it. Are you aware of how insensitive you’re being right now?’

‘Now you’re just being unfair. Christ, it’s like treading on eggshells around you these days. I can’t seem to say or do the right thing . . .’

‘That is not true . . .’

‘So how come every time I suggest we go down to the west, you come up with some excuse?’

‘If you’re suggesting that my not wanting to leave Mum at a time like this to swan off down the country with you is some kind of excuse to get out of seeing your family, then you’d better apologize for that remark right now.’

‘So what about last Christmas, then? And the Christmas before that? And my niece’s Communion? And Connor’s housewarming? And my godson’s first soccer match? You always manage to get out of coming, and then the lads at home want to know why, and I’m left standing there like an eejit not knowing what to tell them any more. You’re starting to run out of excuses, Kate.’

‘Can’t you stop thinking about yourself for one minute?’

‘Actually, you’re the one who needs to stop thinking about herself, for a change. I know what’s happening now is rough, but what you’re going through is ongoing, and you can’t expect everyone around you to put their lives on hold for you. Life goes on, Kate. All I’m asking for is two days of your time. If you don’t want to come with me, fine, but don’t make me feel guilty for going, because I’ve made promises that I don’t intend to break.’

‘I don’t want to be around your family right now because it’s very difficult for me . . .’

‘There you go again. You before everyone. Why don’t you just say what this is really about?’

‘PAUL!’ She’s really shrieking at him now, and it’s getting uncomfortable to watch. To put it mildly. Kate’s a great one for keeping up a perfect shopfront, so to see her now, screaming her head off and tearing lumps out of Paul, is really disconcerting. Kind of like seeing the Queen suddenly losing her temper and flinging a Dresden china plate across a room at a corgi.

‘Do you really want to know what this is about?’ she hollers, scarlet in the face, while he just blanks her and keeps on getting dressed, with his back to her. ‘Fine, I’ll tell you. Have you the first clue what it’s like for me to spend time with your brothers and all their wives and ALL their two bloody dozen kids, or whatever it was at the last count? It’s OK for you – the boys drag you off to look at a site, or to the pub to play with the band, or to some match that one of their kids is in – but I’m left sitting with all the women, while they eye me up and down and wonder what the hell is
wrong
with me. All they can ask me is, now that we have the big house, when will I have news for them all? And then they prattle on about how I can inherit all their buggies and Babygros and strollers. And don’t get me started on your father, who actually said to me that after we start a family, we should consider moving back to the west so that our child can grow up among all his or her cousins. That it’s totally ridiculous you and I living in Dublin, so far away from them all . . .’

‘Well, now that you’ve said it, it is a bit crazy my having to drive up and down every time there’s the sniff of a building job. If you ask me, it would make a lot more sense for us to at least have a base in Galway . . .’

‘And leave Mum here on her own?’

‘Don’t jump down my throat. I wasn’t suggesting we move lock, stock and barrel, all I said was that maybe, just maybe, we should consider getting some kind of bolt-hole down there, that’s all. So I wouldn’t have to crash out in my brother’s spare room whenever I need to be there.’

‘For God’s sake, Paul, there are times I think you’re like some kind of Mafia family who all have to live on top of each other, and you’re Tony Soprano. Honestly, could you blame me for feeling like I’m married to the bloody mob . . . ?’

Kate, you need to shut up right now, while you still can. And did you really have to compare his family to the Sopranos? I mean, wouldn’t the Waltons have done just as well?

‘I’m going to stop you right there, Kate,’ Paul eventually says, with an expression in his eyes I’ve never seen before. Icy fury. Very frightening. ‘Before you really start crossing lines. My family are just trying to include you in their lives, and I apologize if we’re not good enough for you.’

‘Now you’re deliberately twisting it. I never said they weren’t good enough, you’re completely missing the point . . .’

‘You know, I think it’s probably best if I just leave now, before you say anything else you mightn’t be able to take back later on. I’ll be back in two days, and I’ll see you then. Tell your mum I’m thinking of her.’ And with that, he’s out the door and gone.

‘Kate,’ I blurt out loud, unable to sit here and see two people I love so much tearing shreds out of each other. ‘Go after him. Just get up off your arse and chase him to his car, and hug him and tell him it’s all a big misunderstanding. Tell him it’s not that you think you’re too good for his family; it’s that you think they’re all too good for you, because they have big boisterous families and you don’t. At least, not yet you don’t. And that’s what’s making you insecure and petty and wanting to snipe at him all the time. What’s tragic here isn’t that you don’t have kids, because you will in time, I’m sure of it; it’s that you’re letting it drive a wedge between you and the loveliest, gentlest, kindest husband any woman could ask for. Why can’t you just appreciate how lucky you are to have a decent bloke who’d do anything for you? Now go, Kate, go after him. Right now, just do it.’

Great speech, I think, pausing for breath. Shame she never heard a single word of it.

‘OK then, suppose he was in a car crash and ended up like me? Bet you’d be sorry then.’

A wasted guilt trip. She just lies on the bed, staring at the ceiling, looking about as bleak as it’s possible for any person to look. A loud thud as Paul bangs the front door behind him, and she still doesn’t flinch. She just lies mutely on the bed for a sec, then, rubbing her tummy like she’s suddenly got a sharp cramp, she hauls herself up and heads for the bathroom. I don’t follow her, because even angels have to respect other people’s boundaries and, let’s face it, she could be doing more than just a wee in there. A minute later, I hear the loo flushing, then the bathroom door opens as she comes back into the bedroom, opens up a locker drawer, rummages around and produces a big box of Tampax.

Ahhhhh, now I see. So that’s what’s really up with her. She’s just got her period.

And suddenly, in a flash, I know
exactly
what to do.

She makes it so, so easy for me. Like shooting fish. Still rubbing her tummy, she goes back to the bathroom and bangs the door shut. A minute later, she comes back, opens a drawer in her bedside table, takes out a couple of paracetamol, then hops into bed, knocking back the pills with a glass of water. Minutes later, she’s dozing fitfully.

Right. That’d be my cue then.

Next thing, I’m back at home. In Mum’s house that is, except it’s her house as it was about eleven or so years ago. The giveaway being the revolting sludge-brown carpet that’s long since gone, and the woodchip wallpaper and actual stippling on the ceiling. Eughhh. Throw in the revolting sheepskin rug in front of the fire and you’ll get the picture: this is the house that taste forgot. Pride of place, though, just above the telly, is a 3D Sacred Heart lamp with a blood-red flame flickering in front of it, a souvenir of Mum’s trip to Rome, years ago, on the famous occasion when she and her parish church group managed to get an actual audience with the Pope. Mum, of course, bragged to the entire road before she went, thinking that this meant they all sat down with John Paul the Second in his living room and had a lovely chat while he poured them all tea, handed out Jaffa cakes and asked them how they were enjoying their holidays. The reality was they were shoved into a conference hall with about three thousand other pilgrims, and got a blessing from this tiny white dot on the horizon who they presumed was the Pope, but turned out to be just some aide. Then her pal Nuala got pinched in the bum by person or persons unknown, so every time Mum looks at the offensive lamp with the Sacred Heart glowering down at her, she sighs and says, ‘’Course I bought that the day poor Nuala was goosed up in St Peter’s Square. Terrible randy race, the Italians.’

Anyway, I’m in my school uniform trying to watch an episode of
Sex and the City
, and Mum is wrestling the remote control from me, because it clashes with
Midsomer Murders
, her favourite programme.

‘Ah go on, you’d all day to watch telly,’ I’m pleading my case with her. ‘I’ve my Irish oral exam in the morning, and this’ll help me switch off. Don’t you want me to do well in the exam so you can bask in reflected glory? Don’t you at least want me to do better than Nuala’s daughter, she of the straight As in her mocks?’

When I was living at home, this slightly below-the-belt tactic never failed to work, mainly because Nuala is Mum’s most competitive friend, and her daughter is my age and a right cow.

‘No, Charlotte. I refuse to watch four women sitting around talking about their unmentionables. Suppose your father walks in and they’re all using the c word? He’d be mortified, and I wouldn’t blame the poor man, either.’

The door bursts open, but it’s not Dad, it’s Kate, at least the younger version of her, fresh from a first date with some fella she met in college. She marches in, flings her handbag on to the coffee table, hurls her little pump shoes as far away from her as she can, and slumps into her favourite seat on the sofa beside me. All this done wordlessly and furiously, with Mum and I looking on, both of us dying for the full juice.

‘Well then, love,’ Mum eventually says, after a lot of ‘oh dear God, it mustn’t have gone well’ loaded looks thrown in my direction. ‘How did it go with . . . emm . . . Luke, wasn’t it?’

‘Don’t want to talk about it.’ Kate’s standard answer for when she’s so pissed off she can barely restrain herself from flinging things around the place.

‘Well then . . .’ says Mum, fishing, and honestly, you can nearly see curiosity getting the better of her. ‘Just say he rings here looking for you, love, what’ll I tell him?’

‘That I’ve emigrated.’

‘Oh, OK then.’

‘Suppose we tell him you’ve emigrated, then he spots you out and about somewhere?’ I ask, giving a surreptitious half-wink to Mum. ‘What then?’

‘You’re worse than the bloody Gestapo, you pair,’ Kate snaps at us, realizing that she won’t get a minute’s peace till she comes clean and omits no detail, however trivial.

‘Go on, love, give us the full nine one one,’ says Mum, who watches far too many cop dramas for her own good.

‘If you must know, the stupid bastard arrived half an hour late for our date, then said he’d come out without his wallet, and would I buy him pints? Then he had the gall to tell me that he was the best offer that I was ever going to get, just because he happens to be studying law at Trinity, and I’m only doing a computer course. Oh, and just to add insult to injury, then he goes and asks me for the lend of a fiver so he could shoot a few frames of snooker with his friends, who all look either like goths or else drug addicts. Bloody shower of losers. So I marched out of there and got the bus straight home so I’d be back in time for
Sex and the
City
. So why aren’t we watching it?’

Back to the present, and Kate turns over in her sleep, tossing off the duvet cover.

Right then, time for round two.

It’s exactly the same scenario, except time’s moved on. Same living room, same woodchip on the walls, same sludgy carpets, except now there’s photos of Dad dotted all round the place and Fiona is sitting on the sofa with me and Mum, all three of us glued to
Friends
on TV.

‘Oh, I’ve seen this one before,’ says Mum, absent-mindedly thinking out loud. ‘Rachel flies to London for Ross’s wedding, but then he says her name in his vows instead of Emily’s, and there’s murder.’

‘SHHHHHH, don’t tell us, you’ll ruin it!’ Fiona and I chorus, when Kate bursts in, fresh from another date.

‘Ah, there you are, love, how’d it go, with . . . ehh . . . Simon . . . something, oh yes, Walker, wasn’t it?’

‘Shut up and no one move,’ Kate snaps, switching off all the lights and pulling the curtains over, just like in an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.

‘What in the name of God is going on?’ I ask, afraid she’ll make us all lie flat out on the floor in a minute. She’s over by the window, though, intermittently peeping out through the curtains and waving at us all to shut up.

‘Kate, tell me the truth, did that Simon fella turn out to be a drug baron?’ says Mum, alarmed. After some documentary she saw on
Prime Time
, her greatest fear in life is that one of us will end up marrying a crime lord. ‘Because your poor father, God be good to him, will spin in his grave if some eejit you pick up in a bar thinks he can start dealing heroin from outside the front gate. If Nuala gets wind of that, I’ll never hear the end of it.’

‘He is not a heroin dealer,’ Kate hisses, still peering out into the street. ‘Oh for God’s sake! Will you all keep your heads down, please?’

‘Are we going to be in a drive-by shooting?’ Fiona asks nervously. ‘Because, if no one minds, I really need the loo first.’

‘He’s a bloody obsessive weirdo,’ says Kate in a stage whisper. ‘I told him I was an
asthmatic and . . .’

‘You forgot your inhaler . . .’ Mum and I finish the sentence for her. It’s Kate’s standard, failsafe excuse for getting out of a rubbish date.

‘. . . But the headcase insisted on driving me home, so I thought I’d wait until his car drove off and he was well out of the way. Then the plan was, I could slip out and head back into town, to Café en Seine so I could meet up with my gang, but would you look at the bloody lunatic? He’s still sitting in the car, parked outside. I mean what’s he planning on doing? Keeping a stakeout going all night to check I don’t go back out again? Honest to God, is there a sign over my head that says “will happily tolerate fixated headcases?”’

‘Define fixated,’ Fiona pipes up, all ears.