Pack Up the Moon

PACK UP THE MOON

ANNA MCPARTLIN

‘Insightful and moving … defiantly irreverent’

Sunday Independent

It was a night of laughter and celebration. But when

John dies in a dreadful accident, his girlfriend Emma is plunged into despair. She loved John more than life itself - and now death has taken him from her.

She feels nothing, she has lost everything, her world spins out of control.

Or so she thinks. For Emma has friends - good friends who rally round. But the memory of that night returns to haunt each of them in different and trying ways. And Emma knows that if she is ever to laugh at life again, or find the love she once had, she will have to let go of the man she thought she couldn’t live without. She must let go and trust her heart.

‘Captures the pain of loss and longing … but her background in stand-up comedy spills on to every page, making this touching novel so funny’ Irish Independent

PACK UP THE MOON

ANNA MCPARTLIN’S experience of losing her parents

at a young age has given her a profound understanding of

loss, surviving it, and making the very best of life. Before

becoming a full-time writer Anna was, amongst other things,

a stand-up comedian and a claims adjuster. As well as writing

novels, she also writes TV comedy drama. She is in her mid

thirties and lives just outside Dublin with her husband.

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Pack Up the Moon

ANNA McPARTLIN

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First published by Poolbeg Press 2005

Published in Penguin Books 2009

Copyright Š Anna McPartlin, 2005

All rights reserved

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and

incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance

to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

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To my mom

who taught me how to find the smallest glint of light

even in the darkest of places.

To Mary and Tony O’Shea

For being my parents.

To Hallie

just ‘cos …

The Thin Blue Line

It was early March and raining. The clouds were relieving

themselves with a ferocity akin to a drunk urinating after

fourteen pints. I looked through the frosted glass, imagining

the impact the downpour would have on my whites

blowing wildly in the accompanying gale. Then back to

the floor, immediately noticing the slight yellowing in the

grouting around the toilet.

Men, I thought. How hard is it to aim for the loo? I briefly

contemplated how it was that my boyfriend could manage

to clear a pool table with pinpoint accuracy, park a car in a

space the size of a stamp and yet when it came to pointing

his mickey in the direction of a large bowl, he had the

judgement of a drunken schoolboy. The edge of the bath

felt cold under my skirt.

Three minutes.

Three minutes can be a long time. I wondered would

it feel so long if I were defusing a bomb. I started to count

the seconds but quickly lost interest. The mirror needed

cleaning. I’d do it tomorrow. I absentmindedly played

with the stick in my hand until I remembered that I’d just

peed on it. I put it down. I brushed invisible fluff from

my skirt, this being a habit I had picked up from my father

although obviously he was not a skirt-wearer. It was our

response to nerves. Some people wring their hands; my

dad and I cleaned our clothes.

The first time I really noticed our shared trait was when

my brother, aged seventeen, announced that, instead of

becoming the doctor my parents had dreamt of, he was

going to become a priest. My mother, mortified by the

thought that she would lose her son to an absent God,

spent an entire evening screaming shrilly before breaking

down and taking to her bed for four days. My dad sat

silently cleaning his suit. He didn’t say anything but his

disappointment was profound. I remember that I wasn’t

too pushed at the time. As a self-obsessed teenage girl, I

didn’t share the same concerns about Noel’s sacrifice as

my parents, although I admit that the thought of having a

priest in the family was slightly embarrassing to me.

We weren’t very close then. He was your typical nerd,

bookish, intense and politically aware. He studied hard,

brought out the bins without being asked and was an

ardent Doctor Who fan. He never smoked, never indulged

in underage drinking or for that matter in girls. For a

while I thought he was gay, but that theory passed when

I realised that to be gay you had to be interesting. Still, we

were adults now and, although I could never understand

his utter devotion to The Almighty, times had changed and

all the traits that made for a nerdish teenager guaranteed a

fascinating adult. I now counted Father Noel as one of

my best friends.

Two minutes.

I was twenty-six years old. I was in love and living

with John my childhood sweetheart. I had the pleasure of

watching my lover grow from a fair-haired, blue-eyed,

idealistic boy to a fair-haired, blue-eyed, self-assured man.

We’d been together nearly twelve years and for me he was

definitely The One. We’d been living together happily since

college. We were renting a nice place - two bedrooms, two

bathrooms, a kitchen and a cute sitting-room - just off

Stephen’s Green and although it was small and sometimes

smelled of sweet old lady, it wasn’t that expensive which was

amazing considering the location. I had a good job.

Teaching was never my life’s dream, but then I considered

myself lucky to have been unburdened by ambition.

Teaching seemed as good a job as any. Some days I liked

the kids and some days I didn’t, but it was steady. I was

home most days by four thirty and I had three months off

in the summer. John was still in college doing a PhD in

psychology, but he also managed to hold down four shifts

a week as a bartender. Some weeks he’d bring home more

money than I would and he maintained that he learned

more from drunks than he would in college.

We were happy. We were a well-adjusted happy couple.

We had a good life, good prospects and good friends. There

are a lot of people who would like to hawe the kind of

security we had with one another.

One minute.

My mother had often pondered aloud as to when John

and I would think about marriage. I’d tell her to mind

her own business. She’d note that I was her business. We’d

fight about the issue of privacy versus a mother’s love. At

twenty-six I felt too young to marry and this feeling

remained, despite my mother constantly reminding me that

she had two young children by the age of twenty-four.

“It was a different time,” I used to say and that was

true. Most of my mother’s friends were married with kids

by the time they reached their mid-twenties. I was from

a completely different generation. The Show Band versus

the MTV generation. While she grew up on Dickie Rock,

I gyrated to Madonna. Before meeting my dad, her idea

of a fun night out was lining up against the wall at the

local dance hoping one of the lads would pick her for a

waltz. I, on the other hand, was from the disco generation.

Besides, none of my friends were married.

Thirty seconds.

OK, that’s a lie. Anne and Richard met in college. She

was the middle child of a middle-class family from Swords.

He was the son of one of the richest landowners in Kildare.

They met in a queue to sign up for an amateur drama

group during orientation week. They got talking,

abandoned the queue to get coffee. After that, they were

inseparable. They married a year after college. Big deal,

they were the only ones.

Clodagh, my best friend since age four, hadn’t managed

to hold down a relationship over four months. She had

emerged from college a tenacious, intelligent, hardworking

career woman, managing to work her way up to Senior

Account Manager of a large advertising firm within three

years. She succeeded in all she did, with the small exception

of her romantic life, and that perceived failure hurt her.

Then there was John’s best friend Sean, dark, brooding,

dry and beautiful. Clo called him “the living David”. He

had not only made his way through eighty per cent of the

girls in the Trinity Arts block, he’d also managed to nail

a few lecturers along the way. His longest relationship to

date had been with an American girl called Candyapple

(her real name, I kid you not) during a summer we all spent

working in New Jersey. She was your typical coffee-skinned,

brown-eyed, big-breasted, small-waisted nightmare. She had

long curly brown hair that somehow reminded Anne of the

Queen guitarist Brian May. Sean called her “Delicious”; the

rest of us called her “Brian”. They lasted six weeks. He left

college and after a few false starts he fell on his feet, landing

a job as editor of a men’s magazine. His quick wit, sincere

worship of football and encyclopaedic female carnal

knowledge ensured his continuing success. Relationships

didn’t matter and marriage and family certainly was not a

priority.

Ten seconds.

John loved our life. You know those smug couples

you meet and instantly hate. He could be smug like that.

He never seemed to care that Sean had his pick of women

through college. He didn’t even mind that he had only

ever had sex with one person. He was content, loved up,

happy. He was rare. We were rare.

The first time we had sex we were both sixteen. We

were in a tent on the side of a hill in Wicklow. It was a

warm summer night, not a cloud in sight. The moon was

full, round and bright, the sky was navy and thick like

velvet, the trees were towering, leafy and smelt of sun.

No wind, no breeze, the world seemed still. We had our

little campfire, a picnic basket, a packet of condoms and a

bottle of wine, which we both merely sipped, our

underdeveloped taste buds mistaking its fruity freshness

for the taste of rancid crap. Kissing turned to cuddling,

which turned to snuggling, which led to nuzzling,

graduating to feverish genital rubbing and one hymen later