Making It Up as I Go Along Read online

  And so it went on for a couple of days. Every time we came downstairs, it was as if, since our previous visit, a few hours earlier, the layout of the corridors had been rearranged. Always, just as we were at the point of panic, someone appeared. It was as if they were spying on us, watching us on CCTV, doubled over laughing in the viewing room, as we took wrong turn after wrong turn, before someone came to rescue us.

  At mealtimes, we never knew what we’d be getting or how much – sometimes we got course after course, and other times the parade of strange, delicious dishes would end abruptly.

  The staff did a lot of enigmatic smiling, but never spoke, and I began to wonder if they were actually mute. In a dark, fearful moment, I had a flash that they’d offended someone powerful and had had their tongues cut out, and quickly I had to make myself stop thinking that way.

  On the second afternoon I made Himself accompany me on ‘a turn around the grounds’, and although I pretended to admire the olive plants and palm trees I was in actual fact trying to find the wall that marked the boundary of the property. Beaten back again and again by undergrowth that became too thick to get through, I realized I was looking for a way out.

  Because what was really, really bothering me was that, no matter how many corridors I went down, no matter how many left and right turns I took, the one thing I never found was the big wooden front door where I’d entered that first day. I had another flash of terrible fear as my mind presented a picture of the doorway having been bricked up.

  I ‘got’ the philosophy of the Maison des Rêves – it was for jaded control freaks, who travelled widely, from Ulan Bator to Tierra del Fuego, and could have club sandwiches and Sky News no matter where they were. The set-up here was to provide something fresh and wonderful and it was to encourage guests to surrender control. Most people would adore it.

  Now and again we could hear snatches of distant voices from a room above us – I listened hard, it sounded like two women and they seemed to be speaking French, but I couldn’t be sure. And once, I saw two people – a man and a woman – disappearing around a corner. I hurried to catch up with them, but by the time I got there the corridor vibrated with their absence.

  Eventually I confessed my anxiety to Himself. ‘I feel like I’m being kept prisoner by a benign warlord.’ I could actually visualize my jailor – an extremely fat man, wearing rose-coloured silken harem pants, a roomy tunic embroidered in gold thread, curly-toed Aladdin slippers, an orange turban and an elaborately waxed moustache. Despite the bright colours, he exuded a dreadful air of menace.

  I named him Pascha Fayaaz and I described my entire, elaborately imagined fears to Himself.

  I could see myself being ushered into Pascha Fayaaz’s presence, as he lounged on a lapis lazuli daybed. ‘Maaaaaarian,’ he crooned, in a quare-accented, silky voice, ‘I hear you wish to leave us.’

  Then he snapped his fingers, rattling his many golden bangles, and a flunky leapt forward and offered him a platter of Quality Street. Pascha Fayaaz’s fat, elegantly manicured hand hovered over the sweets and eventually he selected the purple one. With unexpected delicacy, taking care not to rip the tinfoil, he unwrapped the sweet and handed the paper to a meek-looking man. ‘For my collection,’ he said, and the meek-looking man hurried away, bearing the tinfoil on a silken cushion. Then Pascha Fayaaz popped the chocolate into his mouth and took a moment to savour it, before his attention snapped, once more, to me. ‘So, Maaaaaarian, you are not happy here. And this, it makes me so very saaaaad. What are we doing that is so wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I stammered. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘The food, is it not to your liking? Your accommodation? The people who serve you?’

  ‘Everything is wonderful,’ I said, ‘beautiful. Especially the … er … “people who serve me”.’ It was important to say that, I felt. I didn’t want any of them to come to any grief. ‘But I miss home.’

  ‘Home?’ He sounded surprised. ‘What about your so-called home do you miss?’

  ‘Well …’ My mind seized on one thing. ‘I miss Bryan Dobson. I miss the six o’clock thing. Every day after the Angelus – no, I won’t get into explaining that, it’s not important – but every day after the Angelus, Bryan comes on the telly and it makes me feel …’ Carefully I sought the correct word. ‘Safe. I’ve survived the day and I’m relieved. Yes, safe, that’s how Bryan Dobson makes me feel. Safe.’

  ‘Safe,’ Pascha Fayaaz said thoughtfully. ‘Huh. Who knew?’ Then he clicked his beringed fingers and I was led back to my room.

  About three and a half hours later, there was a knock on my door. It was one of Pascha Fayaaz’s flunkies. He said, ‘You must come.’

  ‘Why?’ I was seized with anxiety. But already he was walking away so I hurried after him. He led me into Pascha Fayaaz’s sumptuous quarters, where he was, as usual, stretched the length of his chaise longue, eating things. There was an air of something exciting and terrible in the room.

  ‘So, Maaaarian,’ Pascha Fayaaz said. ‘You know that I wish for you to be perfectly happy here. So!’ He clapped his hands together and called, ‘It is time!’

  Outside a door that led off to an anteroom I could hear lots of noise – bumps and muffled shouts, as if some sort of fight was going on. Horrified, I watched as several staff wrestled a creature into our presence. It seemed to be a man, a tall one, dressed in a Western-style suit, but he had a hemp sack on his head. The sack was whipped off the man’s head and his hair was all tossed and he had a bruise on his cheekbone and a cut on his forehead. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he shouted. ‘Who are you people?’

  ‘Now, Maaaarian,’ Pascha Fayaaz crowed with delight. ‘Here it is! Here is your Bryan Dobson! All the way from your Ireland! Now, Maaaaarian, now you will be perfectly happy here for ever!’

  PS: None of this business with Bryan Dobson actually happened, you understand. I mean, I do like him and I do feel safe when he comes on at six o’clock, but no one actually kidnapped him for me, and after four days at Maison des Rêves they unbricked the front door and we were allowed to leave.

  Previously unpublished.

  Norway

  One summer I went to Norway on a cruise of the fjords with Himself and Himself’s parents. I am very fond of Himself’s parents (John and Shirley). I am also doing a load of sucking up to them because my sister-in-law, Caron, has recently given birth to delicious Jude, so she is currently enjoying the position of Most Favoured Daughter-in-Law.

  So we set sail from Newcastle, and one of the things I fear most in life is being hungry, and I was terrified I wouldn’t get fed enough on the boat and what would I be able to do about it, seeing as I was a long way from any shops?

  But I couldn’t have been more wrong: there was TONS of food – breakfast, morning coffee and bikkies, lunch, afternoon tea, a five-course dinner and, if you were still hungry after all that, there were midnight snacks. It was FABULOUS!

  Every day at noon you’d hear this distant rumble, like the ship had come aground on an iceberg, but it was simply the stampede of everyone storming the dining-room doors as soon as they opened for lunch.

  Normally I’d be in the thick of that sort of brouhaha, but they were a determined-looking bunch (despite being generally very aged) and I didn’t fancy my chances, so Himself and myself usually waited until a bit later, when all the pushing and scratching had calmed down. My mammy had been on this self-same cruise two years ago and when I told her about all the pandemonium, she said, not a bit surprised, ‘Oh yes, any time there was food, they were like pigs at a trough.’

  Right then! Norway! A st
unningly beautiful country – clean and pure and uncrowded and unpolluted and any of the people I met were very nice. We saw glaciers and fjords and the midnight sun and my personal highlight was the Marimekko shop in Trondheim where I went pure BERSERK. I bought two nightdresses (one stripy, one spotty), one light-blue raincoat, one matching umbrella, one pair of pink felt slippers, three tea towels and an adorable little pink dress and matching tights for my god-daughter Kitten. I bought so much they gave me 10 per cent off and two free packets of patternedy paper napkins (one blue, one green). Another highlight was the Noa Noa shop in Bergen, but I managed to be more restrained and no one gave me any paper napkins there (but I am not complaining).

  Other Norwegian highlights included four nights of shipboard bingo. John and Shirley had never played before, and when Shirley won forty-eight quid on the last night she was full of talk of taking it up regularly on her return home. I fear I may have corrupted her …

  mariankeyes.com, June 2005.

  Walking in France

  Je suis back from France and I had un temps lovely. Yes, lovely, despite everyone ROARING laughing when they heard I was going on a walking holiday. ‘You in flat shoes,’ they said. ‘I’ve seen it all now!’

  I don’t know why or when the idea of a walking holiday started appealing to me, but it just goes to show how human beings can change. There was a time when I would have thought it was utter hell, but now …

  Entre nous, mes amies, the thing I was dreading most was the ferry journey from Rosslare to Cherbourg. I once went on a school tour on said same ferry when I was fifteen and I remember it as being full of drunken louts (mostly me and my classmates) and I was convinced it would be a nightmare, but this time it was actually remarkably pleasant.

  Himself and myself had a nice tea in a sitty-down restaurant where we were served by a very nice Polish man. After he took our order I said to Himself, ‘Russians are taking over the world,’ and Himself said, ‘He’s not Russian, he’s Polish.’ And then I was a bit mortified as I had thanked the girl at the Information Desk in Russian (because she sounded Russian and her name badge said Svetlana Russiancitizenski or some such), but in retrospect I realized she could just as easily have been Polish and mortally offended by being addressed in Russian when I was only trying to be nice.

  This sort of faux pas normally keeps me awake for hours and could culminate in me going back to the Information Desk to apologize for thinking she was Russian (not that there’s anything wrong with being Russian) and, if she had knocked off for the evening, insisting on finding her cabin and getting her out of bed in her nightie and face cream in order to be apologized at, but mercifully it didn’t happen.

  In fact, I had a lovely night’s sleep. We had a dinky little cabin with bunk beds (I was on the bottom as I have to get up a lot at night to make wees – too much information? I apologize. It’s just that I find a lot of women have this problem and we are all mortified to talk about it) and the motion of the boat was like being rocked, and all in all it was lovely and when we woke up we were in France!

  We were headed for Dijon and it took us about seven hours and even that bit was a pleasure because the French roads are very good and when we stopped a couple of times for refreshments and yes, wees, because I am nearly as bad in the daytime, the people in the shops were LOVELY, all bonjour and merci and au revoir.

  I know everyone says the French are as rude as anything, but maybe that’s only in Paris, and in fairness no one has ever been rude to me in Paris either.

  Actually, now that I remember, that’s not true. I had one of the worst nights of my life in the Georges restaurant on the top of the Pompidou Centre. I’ll tell you the story. Himself and myself were booked for dinner and we were 0.4 of a microsecond late and when I attempted to apologize in my admittedly shite French to the exquisitely beautiful greeting girl she stared and stared at me with such complete and utter contempt that eventually my speech of apology meandered to a halt. She picked up two menus, strode across the room, flung them on a table and stalked away without a backward glance.

  This was around the time I turned forty and was picking fights with people left, right and centre, and I was so voraciously angry but also burning with shame at the way I’d let her make me feel that I decided I wasn’t leaving without doing something. (Every time she passed our crappy table, showing new people to their place, I called out, ‘You’re a bitch!’ But, sadly, the music was too loud and she couldn’t hear me. Himself agreed with me that she’d been horrible, and offered to ‘say something’, but I insisted that I wanted to do it.)

  So at the door, as we were leaving (we’d only had one course and I hadn’t been able to eat mine because my stomach was all full up with rage and shame), I established that your woman could speak English – she could, perfectly – and I told her that she’d been unpleasant and rude when we’d arrived, that it was unnecessary, that we’d had a horrible evening and that we’d never be back.

  In fairness, she was quite surprised, but sadly she didn’t break down in floods of tears like what would happen in a crappy American film and apologize for being a bully but say that she’d been bullied as a child and this was the only way she knew how to cope and that even though everyone kept telling her she was beautiful, she felt ugly, ugly, yes, UGLY on the inside … Anyway, yes, she was a little taken aback and even though I didn’t stop shaking for about three days from summoning up my nerve, I was glad I said something.

  ANYWAY, apart from the bitch at the Pompidou Centre, every French person I’ve ever met has been charm itself.

  We arrived in Dijon around six in the evening and went looking for a chemist and walked around the beautiful town (city? Christ, people can be so touchy about the place they live that it’s important to get it right), and then we saw the green cross of health, the international sign for a chemist, and we went inside and transacted our business.

  As I’ve mentioned before, I adore chemists. They are such useful places, with so many wondrous, diverse wares. Often Mam and I lie on her bed and list the many, many things you can get. We always start with her shouting, ‘Hairbands!’ This is a declaration that the game is ON. So I say, ‘Cotton buds!’ Then she says, ‘Strepsils.’ Then I say, ‘Solpadeine!’ Then she says, ‘Bonjela!’ And so on for many, many happy hours.

  The first time we did it, poor Susan (Tadhg’s then girlfriend), who was living with Mam and Dad for a while (also with Tadhg, I’d better add) until they got their own flat, had to come in and ask us to keep the noise down as she was trying to sleep, she had work in the morning, and although we tried to get her to join in, she couldn’t be persuaded.

  Sometimes, out of the blue, in the middle of a conversation about something completely different, even when loads of other people are there, Mam will look at me and shout, ‘Hairbands!’ And then we’re off.

  Sadly, the chemist in Dijon was quite small and didn’t have the full list of things that Mam and I cover in a session, but Himself and myself had an amazing dinner in Dijon – the first of many – and the following day, the walking began! The weather was magnificent – a bit too magnificent, ontra noo, mes amies, the kind of weather where you’re better off lying beside a cooling swimming pool with a man handy to bring you cooling cocktails. Instead we were marching through vineyards and along trails and I’m not good in the heat at the best of times – being Irish, I’m just not equipped for it – but it’s a small complaint and we walked through picture-perfect villages (or should that be villages?) with family-business wineries and beautiful chateaux and little boulangeries where we bought Gruyère buns for our lunch and everything was so
charmingly French and our hotel was nice and our dinner was fabulous and I was so afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed the next morning (we’d walked about nine miles) but it was no bother to me and all was well with the world.

  We did five days of walking and sometimes stayed in sort of bed-and-breakfast places and other times it was more fancy, but the dinners were always magnificent – except that they’re not exactly vegetarian-friendly. Not that I’m vegetarian, but I’m a bit squeamish, even about stuff like liver, and Himself is the total opposite: if he sees some piece of innard on the menu, it’s almost like a challenge to him, which can sometimes be difficult to stomach, even when it’s not me that’s eating it.

  The worst was when we were in Beaune – the most incredible place (see how I craftily avoided the town/city conundrum there?). I wished I’d had much, much longer there. I bought mirabelle plums at the market and my winter coat in a boutique and they had architecture and oh, all kinds of stuff. On the menu was – those of a delicate disposition might like to look away now – a stew made of coxcombs, you know, the frilly things on the top of cockerels’ heads.

  The minute I saw it I knew he was going to order it and gleefully he did, but the waitress looked aghast. She hurried away anxiously and returned with her boss, an enormously fat woman (which gives the lie to the theory that French women don’t get fat) with bright purple eyeshadow and black kohl-lines flicking up to her hairline, à la Siouxie Sioux (or however she’s spelt) circa 1977.

  Boss woman interrogated Himself about his choice – did he know what he was getting himself into? Had he ever had it before? Did he like tripe? Because it was like tripe, only worse. Then a man in a dinner suit joined in (he might have been the maître d’) and a worried-sounding conversation in French ensued. Then they shrugged (for they are French) and decided that if le Rosbif (apparently that’s what they call Englishmen, isn’t it fantastic?) wanted the joke dinner, they might as well let him have it.