Essays and Stories by Marian Keyes Read online

  people, etc., etc.)

  He was thrilled with the abuse. "Imagine," he said, "Not only do they think I'm Irish. They think I'm a culchee!"

  Just to copper-fasten the situation, he threw his head back and roared, "Hould yeer whisht, ye little pups!"

  Right then, hurling.

  When I lived in London, and English people would compliment hurling and say what a great, fast, exciting game it was, I always said, "Oh God, yes, it 's fantastic." Then I'd change the subject quickly so that I wouldn't have to admit that I'd never actually been to a game. In fairness, I always swore that I'd love to go, but that was only because I never really thought I'd have to.

  However, when it transpired that Clare were playing Galway in the All-Ireland quarterfinal, plans were fashioned, on a night out with friends, Paul and Aoife, for the four of us to attend. I thought it was just a load of drunken codswallop, but before I knew it, the tickets were bought: we were going.

  It caught me on the hop; I don't really "do" sport. Sitting in the cold, on hard benches, watching my side lose isn't my idea of a fun afternoon. Not when there are shops to go round or snoozes to catch up on. I don't think Aoife was too happy either—when the four of us took our seats, she gave me a brave smile. Under interrogation she denied that she was there under sufferance, but that is only because she is as gracious as she is glamorous. However, it was evident that Himself and Paul were absolutely thrilled to be there and let forth random bellows of "Come on the Banner."

  Then the players ran onto the pitch and suddenly everyone sat up and paid attention. While English Premier league footballers look more and more like male models, these lads looked like they'd just had the crap beaten out of them; tough, butty men with head ban dages and pale, freckled legs, they wouldn't have known sculpting gel from a hole in the ground. They were the real thing.

  Then some brass band started playing the national anthem and we all rose to our feet. I couldn't actually remember the last time I'd heard it, but something about it and the sight of the pale-thighed players, there to cover their county in glory, and all the people who had traveled to support them and endure the abuse from the flats, really stirred me.

  Suddenly I was remembering a different Ireland, the Ireland of my childhood, when we were a small, unfashionable backwater, when Michael O'Hare 's speedy commentary ruled the Sunday afternoon airwaves, when we were a rawer, less sophisticated nation, before we 'd been enveloped in a membrane of sleekness.

  It reminded me that we are—or at least were—a rural nation, where the local was more important than the global, where bad blood could endure for generations because someone had kicked someone else 's donkey.

  We 've always had a strong sense of who we are. However, in recent decades, the troughs and peaks of our uniqueness have been flattened out. But at the risk of sounding like a Mick Supremacist, on that particular day, for those few minutes, I felt immersed in a concentration of Mickness and I thought, God, I love being Irish. Frankly, I was quite overcome.

  And so to the game.

  We had great seats, practically on the pitch. It being July, the weather was ferocious. A fizzy mist had hung in the air all day and as the match began in earnest, so did the rain. Aoife and I sat huddled beneath my umbrella, worrying about our hair. The rain, she said, made hers frizz up until she looked like a member of the Jack son Five. I'll see your Jackson Five, I said, and I'll raise you a Sideshow Bob.

  Clare were slated to lose and I just couldn't bear to see it happen. Also the way the players hold the sliothar on their sticks while they run like the clappers makes me incredibly anxious: I'm always waiting for it to fall off. Between these dual anxieties, I averted my eyes and talked to Aoife about hair products while the unequal battle was fought on the pitch.

  When the wind changed direction and began blowing the rain directly into our faces, we stoically stayed where we were. It was only when we were actually being blinded by the precipitation that we moved out of our allocated seats and under cover, where we found ourselves in the thick of our enemies, the Galway fans. A rosycheeked family of Galway supporters directly behind us were eating hang sangwidges out of tinfoil and drinking tea out of flasks. Tourist board plants? Or maybe not . . .

  And before we knew it, it was half-time—and that 's a great thing about Gaelic games, each half is only thirty-five minutes, barely long enough to get bored.

  Time to be refreshed; we made for the confectionery stall. Paul wanted Himself to have a thoroughly Irish experience, involving Tayto, Colleen sweets (remember them?) and red lemonade. But I will always remember that day as the first day I had Crunchie Nuggets. I'll never forget seeing them there on the stall in their golden bag; the breath literally left my body. What a great idea. I mean, what inspiration. Such vision! Until then I had thought that nothing could top Chunky Kit Kat in the sweetmeat reinvention stakes, but it just goes to show how wrong a person can be.

  However, the glow of the Crunchie Nuggets wore off when I re

  alized I had to go to the loo. I'd been dreading it because I feared the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) mightn't hold with toilets. Especially a ladies'. Why would you need a ladies'? Sure, women don't come to matches! They're too busy at home, not taking contraception, kneeling on frozen peas and rearing their eighteen children. And as for the lads, well they can do it anywhere.

  But there was a ladies'! And instead of it being three skanky cubicles, two of them filthy and overflowing, while eight hundred desperate women queued out the door and down the stairs, there were a plethora of clean and empty facilities.

  When the second half started, the atmosphere shifted. The thing was that Clare had been leading at the end of the first half. I'd been in denial about it because I suspect I'm a hex: as soon as the gods know I'm supporting a team, they make them lose.

  But suddenly Galway were anxious and the swagger and bluster that had characterized their supporters at the start of the game was absent.

  Every time Clare had a free, a Galwegian youth from the hang sangwidge family (he was aged about twelve) behind us yelled, "Miss it!" And every time Galway had one, he 'd yell, "Don't waste it, ye goms, don't waste it!" I found such passion very charming, especially in one so young.

  It was impossible not to get caught up in the excitement. I had a knot in my stomach and all talk of hair products was abandoned as I gnawed my nails and watched the pitch.

  Both teams were scoring hand over fist. Unlike soccer, in GAA, people score all the time so that results that look like foregone conclusions suddenly aren't. With a minute to go, the scores were level; it was going to be a draw. Then Colin Lynch (Clare player) got the sliothar over the bar and twenty seconds later, the final whistle blew: Clare had won.

  Himself leaped to his feet, kissed Paul, did a one-man Mexican wave, pulled his T-shirt over his face and bellowed, "Galway, Galway, what 's the score, Galway, what 's the SCORE?" With the superstition that characterizes fans, he decided that I must be a good luck charm and I'd have to go to all the Clare matches.

  "Settle down," I said, "and have a Crunchie Nugget."

  First published in The Croke Park Annual, 2004/5

  NO PLACE LIKE HOME

  Black Out

  It must be something to do with getting older, because out of the blue my tolerance has declined—to all kinds of things: painkillers, late nights, people who sit too close to me on the bus, and—the weirdest one yet—to sunlight. Not the sunlight you get lying on a beach while lackeys bring you free fruit-based beverages, but the sunlight that pours, like an invading army, into my bedroom every summer morning at four A.M.

  Either I wake up at four A.M., the room as bright as day, and can't get back to sleep without wearing sunglasses. Or else I manage to sleep all the way through to about six and wake with my forehead pleated with frowns, my back teeth clamped together, my head pounding and every muscle tensed, in a grim attempt to keep myself asleep, despite the transcendental quality of the morning light.

  And it '
s not like I don't have a blind. I do. A fine, canvas one. I'd thought it was quite sturdy but lately the light has been making mincemeat of it. It might as well not be there. But that 's not the worst bit. Oh no, the worst bit is the thin break between the edge of the blind and the wall. Tiny—but deadly. A razor-thin line of acidbright light slices through and burns me right on the retinas, so I've big yellow balls in front of my vision for the first four hours of being awake and can't see properly and mistake my athlete 's foot cream for toothpaste and gravy powder for coffee and all kinds of other miserable-making things.

  The weird thing is that I've been living in my house and sleeping in my bedroom for six years, without ever even noticing the big yellow ball in the sky so I can't understand why now, all of a sudden, it 's a problem. It 's not like someone has shifted the earth slightly on its axis or moved my bedroom window a few degrees to the east (or have they? Could I be on some reality TV show?), so, reluctantly, I've admitted that it 's got to be me.

  It wasn't always like this, of course. I remember being young and tolerant. Holidays, backpacking in Greece, waking up in curtainless rooms so bright it was like being in the headbeam of a search helicopter flying over a prison riot and my response was always, "Oh look, sunlight, lovely!" In my twenties I spent many happy, curtainfree years in rented flats and it never occurred to me to buy "window treatments." Far more important things to spend my money on. Like haircuts. And drink. And cute fur-backed notebooks.

  But those happy days are gone and I can no longer take the light and I decided that a black-out blind was the answer. I'd experienced the delights of one in London and really, I cannot tell you. The room was as dark as a coal-hole even though the sun was splitting the stones outside. A vampire would have pronounced it satisfactory. Not only could no light penetrate the fabric but (my favorite bit) the blind was actually fitted to the window, like a painting in a frame, so that I need never again experience my old trouble—the sneaky line of ninja light which panfries my retinas every morning.

  Full of hope, I rang a blinds' specialist. Their ad went something

  like, "Blinds, blinds, blinds! You name 'em, we 've got 'em. Your blinds are our command!" Promising, no?

  Er, no.

  I said to the young man (young man? See how old I'm getting?), "I'm looking for proper black-out blinds. Do you do them?"

  "Indeed, we do." Said with great confidence.

  "You do? That 's great. You mean you do the actual black-out blinds that are fitted to a frame in the window."

  There was a pause. It was as if I'd said, "I was watching this documentary, I think it was called Star Trek. And they had this great machine on it, where you could, like, travel vast distances in a few short moments. I'm pretty sure it was called a Beam-me-up-Scotty. Do you stock them?"

  Gently, but unable to hide his amusement, the young man said, "There 's no such thing."

  "There is, I saw one in London—"

  "There 's no such thing," he repeated, this time a little more firmly. Then he changed tack. "Unless it 's a Velux window you're looking for. Are you?"

  "No, just a normal window."

  "Ah right. Then there 's no such thing." He almost added, "Keep taking the psychotropic medicine," then hung up. And I just knew that right away he was going to turn to his colleagues and chortle, "You won't believe what I've just been asked."

  I tried somewhere else. Then somewhere else. Each conversation began encouragingly. Yes, they could indeed do black-out blinds. Until I explained I didn't just want some crappy roller blind with black stuff stuck to the back, and then it all fell apart.

  By the fifth place, I'd become a little stroppy (tolerance shot to pieces 'cos of my advancing years, see) and asked the girl why they claimed to do every kind of blind when clearly they didn't. And she answered, all indignant, "But we do. We do blinds for the roofs of conservatories!" Like that was some sort of huge breakthrough. (Is it? Maybe it is. Not having a conservatory, I wouldn't know.)

  It was a black day, I have to admit. I was very discouraged. Suddenly I took agin Ireland. I didn't want to live in some crappy backwater, where they thought blinds on the roofs of conservatories counted as progress. I was going to move to London. Or New York. Or anywhere where I could live in freedom and buy proper blackout blinds.

  Then—oh, isn't it always darkest just before the dawn—my friend Eileen's fella gave me a number and I shelved my emigration plans. A man came to measure the window. My proper black-out blind is being fitted in a couple of weeks. I'm beside myself.

  First published in Cara, October 2003

  Queen of the Earplugs

  Recently, for reasons we needn't get into right now, I was on a long bus journey in foreign parts. This would have been fine—interesting even, awash with local color, which usually consists of people carrying chickens—except that every other one of the forty passengers was Irish. We were traveling as "a group." And the thing about a large group of Irish people visiting a different country is that we feel the national obligation to be "great craic" weighing heavily upon us. It 's our duty to be entertaining. It 's what we 're famed for and we can't let those poor humorless foreigners down.

  The vivacious journey began with everyone bellowing cheery insults from the front to the back of the bus. And whenever someone went into the bus's toilet, if you didn't make squirty, hissing noises, and give the poor weak-bladdered person a round of applause when they made their red-faced exit, you were regarded as a bit of a killjoy. (I say "you" but I mean "I." "I" was regarded as a bit of a killjoy.)

  You see, I, despite being Irish, was miserable. The problem was the noise—I'm not good on noise at the best of times. And it was midnight and we had an eight-hour journey ahead of us and I was hoping for a sleep.

  But the shouting and the "good-humored" slagging was as nothing when I realized that, Christ, we were going to have a famed Irish sing-song! Someone produced a guitar. Someone always produces a guitar. And it 's usually the person sitting right behind me.

  Never mind that it was the dead of night and we were passing through mile after mile of deserted, freezing countryside, the Irish people sang their patriotic hearts out for those poor craic-free foreigners. We had the sad songs about having to leave Ireland— emigration themes are always popular on journeys abroad, even if it 's just a day trip to Achill. And then we had the shouty, footstamping anthems. When the opening strains of "The Wild Rover" started up I began eyeing the door of the speeding bus, longingly.

  NO, NAY, NEVER.

  One day this will all be over, I thought.

  RISE UP YOUR KILT!

  A time will come when I'm somewhere peaceful and quiet. A library maybe. Or perhaps a convent, one of the ones where they've taken a vow of silence.

  NO, NAY, NEVER, NO MOAAAAARE!

  I'll be old someday and hopefully profoundly, profoundly deaf. Mind you, they say that hearing is the last faculty to go. Just my fecking luck . . .

  AND I'LL PLAAAAAAAAAAY THE WILD ROVER, NO NEVER NO MOAAAAARE.

  Actually, never mind hoping that things will improve in this life, because I can't imagine it. One day, I'll be dead and buried and unable to hear anything and none of this will matter.

  It was literally like being tortured. I wanted to turn around and shove my hands at the guitar player and plead with him, "Go on, pull my fingernails out, I don't mind, do anything you want, just stop FUCKING SINGING."

  After about an hour of this hell—which seemed to last a year— they stopped for a cigarette break, and despite the freezing temperatures outside, everyone trooped off the bus and Himself went with them. (I won't say where the country was because the other passengers might recognize themselves and track me down and sing at me. Let 's just say it 's a part of the world where the winters are harsh and the misfortunate natives aren't much craic.)

  Even Himself, despite being the most easygoing, tolerant person I've ever met, was finding this tough. He had stopped smoking about five years earlier and I was terrified that he w
as going to start again. I didn't blame him. After being on the dry for ten years, I was contemplating going back on the sauce. Genuinely. It was the closest I've ever come to cracking in the entire decade.

  Eventually everyone got back on the bus, but there was still no sign of Himself. He 's definitely had a cigarette, I thought, and he 's too upset to face me. But no, here he was, climbing back on at the last second. "I nearly didn't get back on," he admitted. "I was thinking I'd run away into the forest and take my chances with the wolves."