The Break Read online

  Our elder brother Joe, his wife Siena, and their three sons, Finn (eight), Pip (six) and Kit (four) pile into the hall. Immediately the boys swarm through the house and into Pop’s domain. Against a backdrop of Pop shouting, ‘PUT THAT FECKEN’ DOWN, YOU LITTLE SCUT!’ I explain the crisis to Joe and Siena.

  ‘She said she was going on the piss?’ Joe can hardly believe it.

  ‘So Dominik said,’ Derry says.

  ‘YOU’LL GET FECKEN’ ELECTROCUTED AND IT’LL BE GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU!’

  Joe insists on viewing Mum’s mobile – which is indeed sitting on the kitchen dresser, just like Dominik had said. ‘That’s it, all right,’ he agrees.

  ‘What should we do?’ I ask.

  ‘What do you think we should do?’ he counters.

  This needs to be said: Joe is useless. Charming, well travelled, but useless.

  ‘Look, I’ll get the dinner on,’ Siena says. ‘What do I do?’

  If I’m to be frank, Siena is also useless. They are the Useless Family. They get by on their looks.

  ‘Just take the packaging off and sling them into the Aga, as many as you can fit,’ I say.

  ‘STOP CHANGING THE STATIONS! STOP CHANGING THE STATIONS!’

  The front door opens again and my heart lifts. But as quickly as hope flares, it dies: it isn’t Mum. It’s Neeve, my eldest daughter, the light of my life and the scourge of my heart.

  ‘What’s up?’ She stands in the hall and peels off her jacket. She’s tiny – barely taller than five foot – and very curvy: buxom, neat waist and round little bum. It’s exactly the body-shape I had when I was twenty-two but in those days I’d thought I was fat. I wasn’t – hindsight is a great thing. And maybe in twenty-two years’ time I’ll look back at the cut of me now and think I was pretty hot. Frankly, I can’t imagine it, but I know that sort of thing happens. And not just regarding the size of my butt. I mean, eight months ago I’d thought my life was nothing special but now I’d give all that I own to return and savour every securely married second of it. As that song tells us, we never know what we’ve got till it’s gone.

  ‘Where’s Granny?’ Neeve gathers her red-gold hair up into a thick, high ponytail and narrows her glinting eyes around the hallway. She may have got her body-type from me but the rest of her is pure Richie Aldin. ‘I’ve stuff for her.’ She indicates a bag crammed to bursting with new make-up.

  It is absolute torture to watch as envelopes of cosmetics arrive at our house hoping to feature in Bitch, Please, Neeve’s YouTube channel. If the contents are any good she keeps them, and if they aren’t, they’re rerouted to the deserving poor. I’m rarely among their number.

  ‘Granny’s missing,’ I say. ‘Dominik says she went on the piss.’

  ‘The piss?’ Neeve’s demeanour, when she’s talking to me, is set permanently to scornful, but she truly outdoes herself this time. ‘Granny? Is he mental?’

  ‘Lovely, don’t say “mental”.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the mentallers might take offence and –’

  ‘HERE’S KIARA! HERE’S KIARA! HERE’S KIARA!’ Finn, Pip and Kit explode into the hall to welcome my other daughter, who has just arrived at the front door. She’s in her school uniform. Her shirt has come free from her waistband, her bitten nails are painted with yellow fluorescent pen and she’s bent almost double from the weight of books in her backpack.

  ‘Guys!’ She shrugs off the backpack, opens her arms wide to the boys and they start clambering up her, as if she’s a climbing frame. She’s the sweet-tempered yin to Neeve’s snarky yang, proof that it’s nature, not nurture. My two girls have very different fathers and very different personalities. Neeve is tricky (at least, she is with Hugh and me: I notice she manages to be nicer to the rest of the world) and Kiara is a sweetie.

  ‘BRING ME MY STICK! I’M GOING OUT TO LOOK FOR MY WIFE!’

  ‘Derry?’ I follow the shoal of people into the front room. ‘We should ring the police.’

  ‘Oka– Hold on! Car outside! It’s Declyn!’

  Five years younger than me, Declyn is the baby of the O’Connell family. Everyone – Derry, Neeve, Kiara, Joe, Siena, Finn, Pip and Kit – flows around Pop’s chair and surges to the rattly old bay window.

  ‘HAS HE THE CHILD?’

  ‘He’s getting out,’ someone says. ‘It’s just him. Awwwww!’

  Sixteen months ago Declyn and his husband Hayden had Baby Maisey (via a surrogate, obviously) and we’re all wild about her. But it means that Declyn without Baby Maisey has no cachet whatsoever.

  ‘HAS HE THE CHILD? WOULD SOMEONE FECKEN’ ANSWER ME!’

  ‘No, Pop, he hasn’t,’ I say.

  ‘WELL, SHIT ON IT ANYWAY.’

  ‘Pop, we’re all here beside you. There’s no need to shout.’

  ‘I’M NOT SHOUTING.’

  ‘Wait!’ Derry exclaimed. ‘He’s getting something out of the back seat!’

  ‘Could be his man-bag,’ Finn says.

  Holding our collective breath, we watch Declyn fiddling around – and a huge cheer goes up when he emerges with Baby Maisey in a car-chair.

  Everyone is delighted – everyone except Kit. Quietly he says to me, ‘I hate Baby Maisey.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘I used to be the youngest one. I was the favourite.’

  I nod. ‘Life is hard, little fella.’

  ‘I used to be cute.’

  ‘You’re still cute.’

  He gives me a very grown-up look. ‘Don’t,’ he says.

  We mass towards the door, and as soon as Declyn sets foot into the hall, the car-seat containing Maisey is ferried into the front room where she’s rolled on the floor and smothered in kisses by her cousins.

  Declyn watches with an indulgent smile, then focuses on me. ‘Great dress, Amy. Vintage?’

  ‘Vintage.’ Or, to put it another way, second-hand. Some of my clothes are proper, expensive, designers-from-the-seventies vintage. But others are from the wardrobes of recently deceased old ladies that sell for half-nothing in Help the Aged. (You could say that I have a personal shopper – a lovely volunteer called Bronagh Kingston, who rings me if good stuff arrives in.) And really there’s no point in being morbid – if the clothes are nice and they’re dry-cleaned twice, isn’t it heart-warming to think of them continuing to give a person pleasure? (If I sound a little defensive, it’s because I have to defend my choices to Neeve who, most mornings, treats me to ‘Dead people’s clothes – niiiiiice …’)

  Not that my vintage stuff can be worn every day – if there’s an important meeting, especially a pitch to potential clients, I have to corporate-up, in a suit that isn’t cut right for a person of my shortness. But when the client starts to trust me, like Mrs EverDry seems to, my lovely character-filled clothes can be unleashed. (Tim, he doesn’t like them either. Tim likes things done by the book. He’d prefer if I toiled in workaday navy tailoring.)

  ‘Edwardian governess meets biker chick.’ Declyn spends a few seconds admiring my outfit, then suddenly notices Mum’s absence. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘No one knows,’ I say. ‘She went out to lunch.’

  ‘Lunch?’

  ‘But that was six and a half hours ago.’

  ‘I think she’s home!’ Derry says.

  We hurry to the window. A taxi has drawn up outside. Through the tangle of branches we see its back door opening and a tiny woman – Mum – wearing a pink leather jacket come tumbling out. Before she lands bodily on the footpath, she manages to right herself and says something to the taxi-driver that makes her double over, laugh a lot and lean on the side of the car.

  ‘Is she all right?’ Joe asks.

  ‘Is she sick?’ This from caring Kiara.

  Then Derry articulates what’s becoming clear to us all, as we watch Mum weave her way to the door of the house, her face as pink as her jacket. ‘Is she … scuttered?’

  ‘And what is she wearing?’

  ‘My jacket,’ Neeve says.


  I should have known. Everything is Neeve’s.

  We swarm towards the front door. Mum erupts into the hall and we fall on her with cries of distress. ‘Where were you? We’ve been so worried.’

  ‘I went OUT!’ Mum declares. ‘To a lunch! I got drunk and I won a prize!’ She waves a box of sweets. ‘Turkish Delight! Mint ones!’

  ‘But, Mum, you should have come home earlier.’

  ‘I was enjoying myself. I put up with your father all of the time, listening to him talking rubbish about suing the postman for cutting his hair and asking where our dog is when we’ve no dog and –’

  ‘Granny,’ Neeve says. ‘That’s my jacket! I couldn’t find it when I was leaving last week.’

  ‘I know!’ Mum beams. ‘I borrowed it by hiding it.’

  ‘But why didn’t you just ask for it?’

  ‘Because you’d say no. I wanted it.’ Mum’s eyes are starey and bloodshot. ‘And I’m keeping it.’ She continues to smile in the most uncharacteristically defiant way at Neeve.

  Great, I thought, just great. Now Mum has gone mental too. My husband is leaving me and both my parents are mentally ill.

  5

  And here’s Maura. Cripes!

  ‘Everyone,’ I hiss. ‘Act normal.’ I turn to Mum. ‘Especially you.’

  Neeve bundles Mum up the stairs and I hurry to greet Maura. Trying not to move my lips, I ask, ‘Who have you told about Hugh?’

  ‘No one.’

  It’s hard to believe that: she’s as leaky as Julian Assange.

  ‘Keep it that way because the girls don’t even know and, whatever you do, you’re not to tell Sofie.’

  ‘I haven’t told Sofie.’

  Seized by fear, I say, ‘But you might. And you mustn’t.’

  Sofie, aged seventeen, is a fragile little creature. She’s feckless Joe’s eldest child: her mum is the woman who preceded Siena and, for reasons I won’t get into now, she’s lived with Hugh and me since she was aged three (didn’t I tell you we were modern?).

  Sofie is extremely attached to Hugh and it wouldn’t be right for her to hear about his sabbatical from anyone but him.

  ‘I was thinking about Alastair,’ Maura says.

  Of course Maura would fall for him – she’s a born interferer and he’s the kind of man that most women want to fix. But I see him, week in, week out, cutting a streak through an endless supply of girls and discarding them like old tea-towels.

  ‘Maura, cop on, you’re married!’

  ‘Not for me, you fool. For you! My husband isn’t leaving me.’ Of course he wasn’t. The silent Poor Bastard had had his spirit broken long ago. ‘While Hugh’s away, you should, you know, take your time out with Alastair.’

  Honestly, there is almost nothing I’d enjoy less. Hugh’s the only man I want, but if I could bring myself to consider another, Alastair would be close to the bottom of the list. Not at the actual bottom. No. That honour would belong to Richie Aldin.

  ‘He’s very …’ Maura swallows with difficulty and nods ‘… sexy.’

  ‘He’s revolting.’ I’m fond of Alastair, but thinking of him in that way is distressing. You can just tell that he’s a great man for sexual gymnastics. Whenever I imagine him in bed with one of his laydeez (which happens very rarely), the position they’re in is reverse cowgirl and they’re doing a huge amount of bouncing and whooping – the lucky lady is actually wearing a cowboy hat and swinging a lasso above her head.

  A craving for nicotine hits me like a blow. Ten months ago, I gave up cigarettes – not that I was a big smoker, just a precious three a day, but it was lung cancer that Hugh’s dad had died from and it had felt disrespectful to continue.

  This week has been so tough that there’s a real fear I’ll start again and, in the hope of heading it off, I’ve bought an e-cigarette. ‘I’m just going to …’ I head upstairs where, in one of the chilly bedrooms, Neeve is doing Mum’s make-up. They’re seated at a big old dressing-table that would be an up-cycler’s wet dream. Not for me. Too big, too heavy, too gloomy. I sit on the austere old iron bed (no, can’t get excited about that either – too high, too rickety, too creaky) and watch them.

  Neeve flicks a glance at me and my e-cigarette. ‘You look like you’re playing a midget’s tin-whistle.’

  There is so much that’s wrong with what she’s just said that it’s impossible to know where to start. I settle for ‘You can’t say that word any more.’

  ‘You can’t say anything any more,’ Mum says. ‘Soon it’ll be a crime to speak. People are too easily offended. So what are they now?’

  I wince. ‘Little people. I think.’

  ‘But Little People are leprechauns. Someone should tell them that we’re sorry but they’ll have to find another word.’

  ‘Mum, please.’

  Mum looks up at Neeve. ‘When you said “tin-whistle” there, did you mean something different?’

  Neeve laughs softly. ‘It’s just your dirty mind, Granny.’

  ‘Have I a dirty mind?’ Mum is delighted.

  ‘Filthy.’

  They collapse into giggles and I watch, ashamed of my jealousy. If Neeve was even a fraction as sweet to me as she is to my mum … Mind you, Granny is quite the hit with her granddaughters now. Lately Sofie has been spending the majority of her time here. During the summer just gone, she stopped living with me and Hugh and moved in with Urzula, her mother, in the hope of rebuilding a relationship. Which is in the process of failing. It broke our hearts when Sofie left us and it’s breaking them even more to watch her flail around trying to make Urzula act like a mother. But what can you do? Hugh and I are attempting the near-impossible feat of offering Sofie all the benefits and duties of family, while respecting that she has actual biological parents. These days, Sofie ricochets between Urzula and Mum and Pop but I wish she’d come back to me.

  Speculatively Neeve watches Mum’s made-up face in the mirror. ‘You look great, Granny. Maybe I’ll do a vlog with you.’

  ‘Would I be on telly?’

  ‘Granny …’ A note of warning has entered Neeve’s voice. ‘Don’t make me explain the internet to you again.’

  ‘No, no. No. I understand it. It’s magic telly for the young people.’

  ‘You’d be on my YouTube channel.’

  ‘I don’t want to be on that. The name is mean and – and rude. Imagine me having to tell people I’m on the Bitch, Please show. What does it even mean? Bitch, Please?’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ Neeve says. ‘Mum. Ask me if you can have all of this make-up.’ She indicates the dressing-table, scattered with a Tom Ford eye palette, a Charlotte Tilbury foundation, several contouring tools and three different lip colours.

  Wearily I say, ‘Neeve, can I have all of that make-up?’

  Neeve holds up the palm of her hand, side-eyes me and says, in scathing tones, ‘Bitch, please. See, Granny?’

  ‘No.’

  Neeve smiles. ‘Come on, let’s go downstairs.’

  Off they go to rejoin the raucous mayhem and I sit in the peaceful bedroom, smoke my e-cigarette and meditatively eye the dressing-table. That stuff would be wasted on Mum. Absolutely wasted. I inhale again and consider that it’s a very sorry state of affairs when you’re reduced to stealing make-up from your seventy-two-year-old mother.

  Spurred on by my proximity to cosmetics, I decide to watch the latest on Bitch, Please, and see what Neeve’s recommending this week. There’s the option of asking her in person, I suppose but – and this is a worry – things feel more real if I experience them through my iPad.

  This week is an autumn back-to-school special with the Grange Hill theme and cute title sequences featuring falling leaves and acorns – very pretty. And here’s Neeve, her long golden-red hair streaming down over her shoulders, wearing a crocheted hat, scarf and gloves in a dusty blue shade that makes her green eyes pop. In recent times she’s expanded to cover clothes and accessories as well as cosmetics and she’s caustic about ‘the shite’ she gets sent.

>   But these crocheted pieces are far from shite. They’re embellished with a scatter of Fendi-inspired leather flowers that are adorable but not over-cutesy and the overall effect is so gorgeous I actually groan. To think she’d got those things for free!

  I rarely go into her bedroom because she’s an adult woman and entitled to her privacy. And I’m afraid I’ll lose my shit and start sobbing or trying to eat the lipsticks.

  In my more fanciful moments I think sleeping in her bedroom must be akin to sleeping in a giant make-up bag – even though the cramped space is full of her camera, lights and computer, and the walls are lined with stacks of workaday brown boxes, everything as grimly efficient as a mini-warehouse.

  Like in a job … because it is a job.

  Not one that makes any money, though. Neeve’s rent to me and Hugh is paid using the barter system, by her joining in the house-cleaning we do every Sunday. (This double-jobs as family quality time.)

  Her absence of an income is a worry. She has a degree in marketing from UCD, but instead of getting a job in some multi-national, like her fellow graduates, she decided that making vlogs in her bedroom was a viable career path.

  And maybe it is.

  Because the world is different from when I was her age, right? These days, kids experiment with several irons in the fire, and God knows Neeve works hard. Filming and editing the vlog is the tip of the iceberg. Most of her time is spent badgering advertisers or buttering up publicists. In addition, to keep herself in beer money, she hostesses two nights a week in some ‘skeevy-ass club’.

  Now, on the vlog, she’s talking about new, exciting things in the make-up world, starting off with a primer from Marc Jacobs. She’s making it sound so great that my knuckles are clenched white with longing. Next up is a foundation and she’s less impressed with that. Oooooh. Not impressed at all. She delivers an entertaining rant on its failings, and ends by saying, ‘Aw, naw.’ She sounds just like a Long Island matron and she makes me laugh. She’s a natural comedian and manages to deliver negative reviews without coming across like a bag of bile. There’s a twinkle to her, a narky charm, and if only she wasn’t so spiky with me …