Marian Keyes - Watermelon (5 page)

"What's wrong with all of you? What have I said? Mum, why are you crying?" she said in exasperation.

We just looked at her, huddled together on the bed, tears rolling down our respective faces, newly christened Kate roaring like a train.

"What's going on?" she said in frustration.

Still we sat there. Still we said nothing.

"I'm going downstairs to ask Dad," she threatened. But then she bit her lip and lingered by the door as she thought about it. "Unless he's going to start crying too."

Finally Mum managed to speak. "No, don't go anywhere, love," she said, stretching out her hand to Helen. "Come and sit down. You haven't done anything."

"Then why are you crying?" asked Helen, reluctantly returning to us weeping on the bed.

"Yes, why are you crying?" I asked my mother. I was just as curious as Helen. Had her husband just left her? Did her diaper need changing?

"Because I was just thinking about Granny," she sniffed. "And how she didn't live to see her first great-grandchild. And it's lovely that you've named the baby after her. She would have been glad. And honored."

I felt so guilty. At least my mother was still alive. Poor Mum, Granny had only died last year and we all missed her so much. I hugged Mum and baby Kate, both of them crying.

"It's such a pity," mused Helen wistfully.

"What is?" I asked her.

"Oh you know, that Granny wasn't named something nice like Tamsin or Isolda or Jet," she said.

I don't know why I didn't kill her there and then.

But for some reason it was very hard to get angry with her.

And then she turned her attention to me. "And why are you crying?" she demanded of me. "Oh, God, I know, I bet

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you've got that postnatal depression thing. There was a thing in the paper about a woman who had that and she threw her baby out of a twelfth-story window and then she wouldn't open the door when the police came and they had to break the door down and she hadn't taken the trash out for weeks and the place was disgusting and then she tried to kill herself and they had to put her in an electric chair. Or something." Helen spoke with relish, never one to let annoying little details like hard facts interfere with the telling of a good blood-thirsty tale.

"Or maybe they just locked her up, or something," she admitted reluct- antly, trailing off.

"Anyway, is that what's wrong with you?" she demanded cheerfully of me, back on track. "Just as well we don't live on the twelfth floor, isn't it, Mum? Otherwise it'd be splatted baby all over the patio. And Michael would go crazy about the mess."

Michael was our ill-tempered, work-shy, superstitious octogenarian gardener. The wrath of Michael was a fearful thing to behold, as was Mi- chael's gardening. My father was far too frightened of him to fire him. In fact, the whole family was terrified of Michael. Even Helen was quite sub- dued around him.

I remembered the afternoon the year before when my poor mother stood, freezing, in her apron (which she wore purely for the sake of appearances) in the garden, nodding desperately, smiling tightly, far too afraid to leave, as Michael explained, in great detail, with inarticulate grunts and frighten- ingly wide-sweeping gestures with the shears, how, for example, if the hedge was trimmed the wall would fall down. ("You see, it needs the hedge for the support, missus.") Or how if the lawn was cut all the grass would wither and die. ("The germs gets into the grass, in through the cut bits, and it all just ups and dies on you.")

My mother finally made her way back into the kitchen, where she tear- fully banged utensils as she boiled the kettle for Michael's tea.

"The lazy old bastard," she sobbed to myself and Helen. "He never does anything. And he made me miss The Flying Doctor and Countdown. And the grass is up to our knees. I'm

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ashamed of my life of it. We're the only house in the neighborhood with a jungle of a garden. I've a good mind to spit into his tea!"

A tearful pause. A count of three.

"May God forgive me," she quavered. "Helen, leave those cookies alone! They're for Michael's tea."

Michael was at the back door at this stage, conspicuously holding his back, as if it ached from the rigors of his labor.

"Can I pour your tea?" my mother asked him obsequiously.

But later that evening I heard my parents arguing in the kitchen.

"Jack, you'll have to say something to him."

"Look, Mary, I'll cut the grass myself."

"No, Jack, we pay him to do it. So he should do it. Giving me all that nonsense about grass catching germs! He must take me for a right bloody idiot."

"All right, all right, I'll talk to him!"

But Dad never "talked" to Michael. And I happened to know for a fact that he cut the grass himself--the day Mum went to Limerick to see Auntie Kitty--and told my mother a barefaced lie about it.

Helen was right. If a baby was "splatted" (is there such a word?) all over the patio, Michael would indeed go crazy about the mess.

But it wasn't going to happen.

Although if Kate didn't stop crying soon, I'd have to reconsider that.

"No, Helen," I explained to her. "I don't have postnatal depression. Well, I don't think I do. Not yet, anyway."

Christ! That was all I needed.

But before I could tell her about James's leaving me, my dad came into the bedroom.

We were going to have to start moving some of the furniture out into the hall if the visitors continued to arrive at this rate.

"Hijack," we all chorused.

My father acknowledged this greeting with a smile and a bow of his head. You see, my father's name was Jack, and in the early seventies when hijacking was the popular news item

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(since overshadowed by child abuse), an uncle from America greeted my father with the words "Hi Jack." My sisters and I nearly did ourselves an injury with mirth. It never failed to raise a smile.

Well, perhaps you needed to be there. "I've come to see my first grand- child," announced my dad. "Can I hold her?"

I handed Kate over to Dad and he held her expertly. Immediately Kate stopped crying. She lay placidly in his arms, clenching and unclenching her little starfish hands.

Just like her mother, I thought sadly--putty in men's hands.

I really would have to nip this in the bud with Kate. Get some self-respect, girl! You don't need a man for your happiness! Every other mother would be reading her little girl stories about engines that could talk and wolves that meet their comeuppance. I would read my child feminist diatribes in- stead, I decided.

Out with The Little Mermaid and in with The Female Eunuch.

"When are you going to give her a name?" asked Dad.

"Oh, I just have," I told him. "I'm going to call her after Granny."

"Lovely," beamed Dad.

"Hello, little Nora," he said to the pink bundle in a singsong baby voice.

Helen, Mum and I exchanged stricken looks.

Wrong granny!

"Er, no Dad," I said awkwardly. "I've called her Kate."

"But my mother isn't called Kate." He frowned in confusion.

"I know, Dad," I faltered. (Oh Christ, why was life so fraught with pit- falls?) "But I've called her after Granny Maguire, not Granny Walsh."

"Oh, I see," he said a bit coldly.

"But I'll give her Nora for her second name," I promised cringingly.

"No way!" interrupted Helen. "Call her something nice. I know! How about Elena? Elena is Greek for Helen, you know."

"Shush, Helen," admonished Mum. "It's Claire's baby."

Really, Helen was exhausting.

However, as she had the attention span of a saucepan--

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that is, absolutely none whatsoever--she soon turned her attention to other things.

"Hey, Dad, can I have a lift to Linda's?"

"Helen, I'm not a chauffeur," replied Dad, evenly and tightly.

"Dad, I didn't ask you what you do for a living. I know what you do for a living. I simply asked you for a lift," Helen said in a very "I'm prepared to be reasonable about this" voice.

"No, Helen, you can bloody well walk!" exclaimed Dad. "I honestly don't know what's wrong with all you young people. Laziness, that's what it is. Now, when I--"

"Dad," Helen interrupted him sharply, "please don't tell me again how you had to walk three miles to school in your bare feet. I really couldn't bear it. Just give me a lift." And she gave him a little cat smile from under her long black fringe.

He stared at her in exasperation for a moment and then he started to laugh. "Oh, all right then," he said, jingling his car keys. "Come on."

He handed Kate back to me.

The way a baby should be handed back.

"Night, night, Kate Nora," he said.

Dad and Helen left.

Mum, Kate Nora, and I remained on the bed, savoring the silence occa- sioned by Helen's departure.

"Now," I said sternly to Kate, "that was your first lesson on how to treat a man, courtesy of your Auntie Helen. I hope you took lots of notice. Treat them like slaves and, sure enough, they'll behave like slaves."

Kate stared wide-eyed up at me.

My mother just smiled inscrutably.

A smug, secret smile.

A knowing kind of a smile.

The smile of a woman whose husband has done the vacuuming for the past fifteen years.

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And so to bed.

It felt very odd to be going to sleep in the bed in which I had spent my teenage years. And it was kind of weird to be kissed good-night by my mother when I had my own child in a bassinet beside me.

I was a mother, but I didn't need Sigmund Freud to tell me that I still felt like a child myself.

Kate stared open-eyed at the ceiling. She was probably still in shock from her encounter with Helen. I was a bit anxious about her but, to my surprise, I actually felt quite tired. I went to sleep quickly. Although I'd thought that I really wouldn't be able to sleep at all.

Ever again, I mean.

Kate gently roused me at about two A.M. by crying at about a million decibels. I wondered if she had gone to sleep at all. I fed her. Then I went back to bed.

I went back to sleep but, a few hours later, I jolted awake again, filled with horror. Horror that had nothing to do with the exuberantly flowery Laura Ashleyesque wallpaper, curtains and duvet cover that surrounded me and that I could dimly see through the darkness.

Horror that I was in Dublin and not in my apartment in London with my beloved James.

I looked at the clock and it was (yes, you guessed it) four A.M. I should have taken comfort from the fact that approximately a quarter of the Greenwich Mean Time world had just

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jolted awake also and were lying, staring miserably into the darkness, worrying about everything from "Will I be laid off?" to "Will I ever meet someone who really loves me?" to "Am I pregnant?"

But it was no comfort.

Because I felt as if I was in Hell.

And comparing it to someone else's Hell didn't make the pain of mine any less.

I sat up in bed in the dark.

Kate slept peacefully beside me.

We were like night watchmen, staying awake in shifts. Although the re- semblance ended there, because I couldn't say--well, at least not with any sincerity--"Four o'clock and all is well."

My stomach lurched with the horror of it all. I couldn't believe that I was in my parents' house in Dublin and not in my apartment in London with my husband. I felt that I must have been out of my mind to have left London and abandoned James to another woman! Had I gone completely mad? I had to go back. I had to fight for him! I had to get him back!

I couldn't be without James.

He was part of me.

If my arm had fallen off I wouldn't have said, "Oh, leave it there for the moment. It'll come back if it's meant to be. No point in forcing it. It might only drive it away." After all, it was my arm, and James was much more a part of me than any old arm.

I needed him a lot more.

I loved him a lot more.

I simply couldn't be without him.

I wanted him back. I wanted my life with him back. And I was going to get him back. (And get him on his back.)

(Sorry, that was flippant and vulgar.)

I was panic-stricken: I should never have left.

I should have stood my ground and just told him that he and I would be able to work things out. That he couldn't possibly love Denise. That he loved me. That I was too much a part of him for him not to love me.

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But I had admitted defeat and delivered him into Denise's cellulitey (but they were!) arms without any kind of protest.

I had to speak to him now.

He wouldn't mind my calling him at four in the morning. I mean, this was James we were talking about here. He was my best friend. I could do anything and James didn't mind. He understood me. He knew me.

And I would fly back to London with Kate in the morning. And my life would be fixed.

The last week would be forgotten. The break in our lives would be mended seamlessly. The scar would fade. Only if you looked very closely would you ever see it.

I know what you're thinking.

No, really, I do.

You're thinking, "She's gone mad."

Well, maybe I had. Maybe I was deranged with grief.

You're thinking, "Have some self-respect, Claire."

But I'd realized that my marriage mattered more to me than my self-re- spect. Self-respect doesn't keep you warm at night. Self-respect doesn't listen to you at the end of each day. Self-respect doesn't tell you that it would rather have sex with you than with Cindy Crawford.

I struggled out of bed, fighting my way through the acres of nightgown that my mother had insisted that I wear. When I fled London I had forgotten to pack a nightgown. And when my mother discovered this she tartly in- formed me that no one was sleeping naked under her roof. "What if there was a fire?" and "That might be how they do things in London, but you're not in London now." So I had a choice of wearing a pair of Dad's paisley pajamas or borrowing one of Mum's huge, Victorian, floorlength, high- collared, fleece-lined, flowery nighties. How the woman ever managed to get a man to impregnate her even once, never mind five times, while asso- ciating with such garments was beyond me. They could have dimmed the ardor of a fifteen-year-old Italian.

I had chosen the nightgown over Dad's pajamas because the huge quantities of fabric in the nightdress made me feel waiflike and skinny and cute. Whereas Dad's pajamas were alarmingly and depressingly snug.

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So keep your smart remarks about my nightgown to yourself. There was method to my madness (well, at least to that particular aspect of it). I happened to know what I was doing. Emaciated, that's how I felt. Skinny and floaty and girllike. It took me about ten minutes to get out of bed, and when I finally managed to stand on the floor, I nearly hung myself by standing on the back hem of the nightie, thereby pulling the front collar upward tightly and violently onto my throat in a vicelike grip.

I coughed and choked a good bit and Kate started to move and fret restlessly in her cot. "Oh, don't wake up, darling," I thought frantically. "Don't cry. There's no need. Everything's going to be all right. I'm going to get your daddy back. You'll see. You hold down the fort here."

And miraculously she settled and didn't wake up. I tiptoed out of the dark room and out into the landing. The huge nightgown swirled roomily around me in a pleasing manner as I went down the unlit stairs. The phone was downstairs in the hall. The only light was from the street lamp outside the house, which shone through the panes of frosted glass in the front door.

I started to dial the number of my apartment in London. There were a couple of clicks as the phone in Dublin connected with the phone in an empty apartment in a city four hundred miles away.

I let it ring. It might have been a hundred times. It might have been a thousand times.

It rang and rang, calling out to a cold dark empty apartment. I could imagine the phone, ringing and ringing, beside the smooth, unruffled, un- slept-in bed, shadows from the window thrown on it as the lights from the street streamed in through the open curtains. Open, because there was no one there to close them.

And still, I let it ring and ring. And slowly hope left me.

James wasn't answering.

Because James wasn't there.

James was in another apartment. In another bed.

With another woman.

I was crazy to think that I could have got him back just

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because I wanted him back. Temporary insanity had come a-calling and I had shouted "Come on in, the door is open." Luckily, Reality had come home unexpectedly and found Temporary Insanity roaming the corridors of my mind unchecked, going into rooms, opening cupboards, reading my letters, looking in my underwear drawer, that kind of thing. Reality had run and got Sanity. And after a tussle, they both had managed to throw out Temporary Insanity and slam the door in his face. Temporary Insanity now lay on the gravel in the driveway of my mind, panting and furious, shouting, "She invited me in, you know. She asked me in. She wanted me there."

Reality and Sanity were leaning out of an upstairs window, shouting, "Go on, get going. You're not wanted around here. If you're not gone in five minutes, we'll call the Emotions Police."

I suppose any psychiatrist worth his salt would have said that I was In Denial. That the shock of James's leaving me so suddenly was too great for me to assimilate.

I sat on the floor, in the cold, dark hall. After a long time I hung up the phone.

My heart, which had been beating frantically, returned to normal. My hands stopped shaking. My head stopped fantasizing.

I wouldn't be going back to London in the morning.

My life was here now. At least for the moment.

And although I felt as weary as a person a thousand years old, I felt that I would never be able to sleep again.

How I wished that we had a neurotic mother. One who kept sleeping pills and Valium and antidepressants by the crateload in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. As it was she acted as if we were prospective candidates for the Betty Ford Clinic if we asked for two aspirin for a sore throat/stomachache/broken leg/perforated duodenal ulcer. "Offer it up," she would say. "Think of Our Lord suffering on the cross." To which she might receive the reply, "Being nailed to a cross would be a day at the races compared to this earache."

This, of course, would reduce the chance, however slim, of extracting drugs from my mother. Blasphemy was high on her

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list of unforgivable things. As it was, the chances of procuring even an al- coholic drink were unpredictable. Neither of my parents drank very much. And they kept very little alcohol in the house. In my younger days, those halcyon days before I discovered what alcohol could do for me, we had a full, if eclectic, liquor cabinet.

Purest Polish vodka jostled shoulders with liter bottles of Malibu. Bottles of Hungarian Slibovitch behaved as if they had every right to stand next to a bottle of Southern Comfort. There was no cold war in our liquor cabinet.

You see, Dad was forever winning bottles of brandy or whiskey at golf. And Mum would occasionally win a bottle of sherry or some kind of girlie liqueur at bridge. People brought us presents of bottles of fancy drink when they went on vacation. Our next-door neighbor brought us back a bottle of ouzo from Cyprus.

Dad's secretary brought us the Slibovitch when she went on her vacation behind the Iron Curtain. (This was in 1979, and myself and my sisters all thought she was really daring and brave and questioned her at length on her return as to whether she had witnessed any violation of the human rights of the Hungarians.) Anna won a bottle of fluorescent yellow banana schnapps at the St. Vincent de Paul Christmas raffle. Someone else came by a stray bottle of apricot schnapps.

Bit by bit our alcohol collection grew. And, as my parents barely drank and we children hadn't started yet, our liquor cabinet overfloweth.

However, those happy days were no more.

I'm sorry to report that when I was about fifteen, I discovered the delights of alcohol. And quickly came to realize that my pocket money was not going to stretch to accommodate my newfound passion. With the result that I spent many an anxious hour looking over my shoulder as I siphoned off small amounts from the various bottles in the cupboard in the sitting room.

I decanted them into a small lemonade bottle I had procured as a recept- acle for the concoction I would make. I was afraid to take too much from any one bottle, so I would choose

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from a wide spectrum of drinks. And put it all into the one lemonade bottle, you understand. With scant regard to what the final product tasted like. My priority was to get drunk. And if I had to drink something that tasted disgusting to do so, then I would.

I spent many a happy hour, after drinking the mixture of (let's just say) perhaps sherry, vodka, gin, brandy and Vermouth (Auntie Kitty had brought us the Vermouth from her trip to Rome), joyfully inebriated, at whatever bar I managed to bully or hoodwink my parents into letting me go to.

Great days. Glorious days.

To avoid any awkward and embarrassing scenes with my parents I would replace whatever I had taken from each bottle with a corresponding amount of water. What could be neater, I thought?

However, like those delicate plants that are overwatered and die, I managed to also overwater a lot of alcohol. A bottle of vodka, in particular.

My day of reckoning finally came.

One Saturday evening, when I was about seventeen, Mum and Dad had the Kellys and the Smiths over for drinks. Mum and Mrs. Kelly happened to be drinking vodka. Or so they thought. However, thanks to my efforts over the previous eighteen months or so, what was once Smirnoff was now more or less 100 percent purest, unadulterated water, untainted by the merest hint of alcohol.

The rest of the party had the good fortune to be drinking actual alcohol.

So, as Dad, Mr. Kelly, Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith got louder and redder and chattier and laughed at things that weren't remotely funny, and Dad told everyone that he didn't declare all his income to the tax man and the Smiths revealed that Mr. Smith had had an affair last year and that they'd nearly split up but they were making a go of things now, Mum and Mrs. Kelly sat stiff and poker-faced, smiling tightly as the others guffawed with laughter.

Mum found nothing even remotely amusing in Mrs. Smith's spilling her Bacardi and Coke (I didn't really like Bacardi, so its alcoholic content was pretty much intact) all over

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the good sitting room carpet, but Dad was highly entertained by it. Mirth abounded. All except for the vodka drinkers.

The penny dropped with my mother the next day.

The bottle of vodka was sent for and subjected to several tests. (As in, "Here, smell that. What does that smell like to you?" "Nothing, Mum." "Exactly!")

Results from the makeshift forensics lab set up in the kitchen showed that the bottle of vodka had indeed been tampered with. Tampered with repeatedly, in fact.

There was a tearful scene between myself and my parents. Well, my mother, at least, was tearful. But with embarrassment and rage. "Oh, the shame of it," she wailed. "Inviting people over and offering them drinks and giving them watered-down stuff instead. I could die! How could you? And you took the pledge and promised not to drink until you were eight- een."