Under the Duvet Page 6

  Most of this stuff seems to kick off in Southern California. Los Angeles, in particular, seems to be the original life-source of nearly all things codologistic, with a self-renewing well bubbling constantly to the surface. I can’t shake an image of a think-tank of Los Angelenos sitting around appropriating Eastern, Native American and Amazonian carry-on and reshaping and marketing them into the Next Big Thing. It’s no coincidence that Los Angeles is also the most mammon-obsessed, materialistic place on earth. Your car is the most important thing about you. And your teeth. Oh yeah, and your aura…

  When I was in Los Angeles, one of the new notions doing the rounds was getting your day off to a good start by doing what the Hopi Indians used to do. Rising at four a.m., facing the east, taking all your clothes off and then ‘washing yourself in the rays of the sun’. A good day guaranteed – you’ll get the part, you won’t feel hungry, whatever is your heart’s desire. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this notion rocks up on our shores sooner or later (although people will have their work cut out to find any sun rays to wash themselves in, but however).

  So why, in holy Catholic Ireland, where we’re sorted for divine love and eternal life, are people talking about ‘positive energy’, hanging dream-catchers from their windows and consulting the I-Ching?

  There are a variety of theories – apparently, the end of a century is a time when people traditionally go bananas. The last decade of the nineteenth century was called the Naughty Nineties on account of folk losing the run of themselves. And as for the end of a millennium, well, all hell breaks loose entirely… At the end of the last one many people assumed the world was going to end. Likewise with this one. Even though the date from when the two thousand years began running is entirely arbitrary, some are convinced that it means something.

  As well as millennium fever, there are other reasons for so much alternative spirituality knocking around. The eighties in Ireland were economically depressed, but in Britain, where I lived, things were booming. Money mattered, the labels on your clothes were vital and the size of your flat was an indication of your worth as a person. Altruism was for wimps. You stepped over the homeless person and scorned the disadvantaged because you were eating black-squid-ink pasta and buying three-hundred-quid jumpers from Joseph. What did you care? Money was spent, spent, spent, being poured into the hole at the centre of one’s psyche in an attempt to plug it.

  Though not everyone was a junk-bond trader, so many aspired to be. But there came a certain point where the expending of cash just wasn’t hitting the spot. No matter how many British Telecom shares people owned, they still didn’t feel content. Hopes were high that their new Golf GTi would finally fix them, that their next Club Med holiday would do the trick, that all they needed was to up the number of black-squid-ink-pasta dinners they had.

  But most sociological patterns are cyclical and the eventual reaction to extreme materialism and its commensurate hang-over is to look for a spiritual element to things. (A bit like swearing you’ll never drink again after a hard night on the sauce.) Around the start of the nineties in London, there was an upsurge of interest in a form of Buddhism. The form, unfortunately, where you chant for money and possessions, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. A loaded young stockbroker friend moaned to me that he needed to get back to basics, to rediscover what was important. To that end he was taking himself and his £100,000 Porsche on a random drive across Europe, and as a nod to his new hairshirt-and-ashes existence, he proposed driving in his bare feet.

  It was around then that the first whisperings of the healing quality of crystals began. Basically, you bought a load of crystals, placed them at regular intervals around your matt-black flat and waited to stop feeling like shit. Shortly after that, meditation as a commodity made its appearance. You gave a ton of money to someone who’d been to India and they taught you to repeat a word over and over again and thereby achieve peace of mind.

  Naturally enough, alternative spirituality crossed the Irish sea – sooner or later most British social phenomena make their way to Ireland (except maybe Paddy-bashing). Also, we’re in a very strange position in Ireland at the moment: the stranglehold the Catholic Church had on this country has largely disappeared, but a vacuum has been left by its departure. No matter how sophisticated human beings become, it seems that the need to know there’s something ‘out there’ is relentless. To have faith in something, to be happy – that’s what most people want, isn’t it? (With the possible exception of Leonard Cohen.) So into this vacuum has rushed all manner of codology.

  Which I’m very drawn to – always have been. I’m madly superstitious, and I love having my fortune told. (Which sends my mammy wild with annoyance. ‘They’re only a crowd of money-grabbing charlatans,’ she exclaims. ‘Wouldn’t it be more in your mind to pray to the Holy Spirit?’) In my time I’ve consulted Angel Divination cards, burnt wish-kit candles and tried to read Ogham sticks. But I’ve learnt something. There’s no point having crystals in my sitting-room if I step over hungry, homeless people on the streets of Dublin, if I refuse to buy The Big Issues from Bosnian refugees, if I turn away people in need or if I deliberately cause someone harm with my actions or words. I can fill the room with crystals and I’m still going to feel like shit.

  I didn’t have a lot of time for the Catholic form of codology, but I’d liked one of the things that that Jesus bloke said – do unto others as you would be done by. Now, there’s a thought for the new millennium.

  First published in Irish Tatler, November 1999.

  FRIENDS AND FAMILY

  As you will be hearing a lot about my family in this section, I’ll give a little bit of info. Like most people, I was born; but unlike most people, I was born a month late. The net result was that instead of being a sunny, dynamic Leo, I am a neurotic, nit-picking Virgo (or maybe it’s just me). It was a hard lesson and since then, I always try to arrive on time.

  Like many people, I have a set of parents, a mother and father, one of each. They are very nice and decent. I’m sure I’ve been a great trial to them, what with having first been a teenager, then an alcoholic. But they are so nice that whenever anyone says to them, ‘You must be very proud of Marian’ (i.e., she gave up the sauce and managed to get published), they invariably reply, ‘We were always proud of her.’ See what I mean – decent! They are called Ted and Mary. Ted was an accountant, now retired. He knows everything there is to know about women’s fiction and regularly rearranges the displays in the local bookshop so that the only books you can see – floor to ceiling – are mine. Mary – popularly known as Mam even to people who aren’t her children – is the best storyteller I have ever met. I’m always on at her to write a book, and maybe she will one day.

  I am the eldest of five. Many of my siblings have been decent enough to move abroad so that we have nice places to go on our holidays. Niall is three years younger than me and lives in Prague. He is married to Ljiljana and they have a little girl called Ema. She is the world’s cleverest, most beautiful child. Caitríona is four years younger than me and lives in New York. Tadhg and Rita-Anne are twins, eight years younger than me. Tadhg is trying to decide where to live – I have respectfully suggested the Maldives. Rita-Anne lives in Dublin and is resisting any pressure to move. Despite this I am still very fond of her. In fact, I am very fond of them all.

  I am married to a man called Himself (he also answers to the name of Tony). I met him in England and have imported him to Ireland. He’s calm and easygoing, except when his football team are doing badly.

  Till Debt Us Do Part

  This was written for Image about a year after I got married, while I was still coming to terms with what it meant…

  When I got married at the age of thirty-two, I expected some changes in my life. Naturally, I was prepared for some feelings of loss to accompany the huge realization that for as long as I lived I would never, ever again have another boyfriend. Ever.

  Ever again. I mean, NEVER.

  But I didn’t expect t
he day-to-day stuff to change very much. After all, Himself and I had done the economically viable thing and lived together for a few months before walking up the aisle. (It wasn’t just economics, it was actually a question of survival – my flat in Notting Hill was so cold in the winter I had to put my coat on before going to bed, so I like to joke that I’d have moved in with any man who had central heating. But anyway.)

  So I thought we knew each other. He had seen me without make-up. I had seen his Santa Claus underpants. I knew about the Genesis belt buckle he had. He had tried to eat a meal I had cooked (I use the word very loosely). I had seen photographs of him snogging other girls. He had seen the picture of me making my confirmation.

  I didn’t think we had anything left to surprise each other with. I thought we were safe.

  But, suddenly, almost from the second we were pronounced man and appendage, he decided I had become Wife, Great Finder of Things.

  It began almost immediately. One morning a couple of days after we got back from honeymoon, I was shaken awake by Himself, who was getting ready to go to work. ‘Author Girl, Author Girl,’ he hissed. ‘Author Girl, wake up.’

  ‘Wha’?’ I asked, hair sticking up all over the place, my eyes slitty with sleep.

  ‘Do you know where my cufflinks are?’ he asked.

  ‘What time is it?’ I mumbled.

  ‘Seven o’clock. Have you seen my cufflinks?’

  ‘Cufflinks?’ I muttered, in a daze. ‘How would I know where your cufflinks are? I didn’t even know you had cufflinks, now let me go back to sleep.’

  To the sound of him tearing a drawer apart, I pulled the duvet back over my head, talking quietly to myself. ‘Don’t know what’s wrong with him… cufflinks… middle of the bloody night… did you ever?…’

  And when I woke up again, I thought I had dreamt the whole thing. At least I hoped I had.

  So imagine my alarm when, a couple of evenings later, he spent about an hour and a half banging and rooting around in a cupboard in the kitchen. Then he marched into the front room – obviously in a right fouler – and said accusingly, ‘Where’s my metal tape measure?’

  There and then I decided to grasp the nettle, swallow the medicine and address the issue. He had obviously read some sort of ‘How to be a Husband’ manual and it was time to put a stop to it. ‘Now look here,’ I said. ‘I know nothing of metal tape measures. I am, after all, only a woman. And you’re to stop asking me to find things for you. I haven’t been visited with psychic powers since we got married.’

  ‘Hah!’ he said, throwing his head back. ‘Hah!’

  ‘Hah, what?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘Hah!’ he said again. ‘That’s good coming from the woman who had me crawling around on my hands and knees… on my hands and knees looking under the couch for her glasses, for a good thirty minutes…’

  ‘Oh that,’ I murmured.

  ‘… when all the time she had them on her head.’

  He folded his arms and nodded at me self-righteously. ‘There’s a pair of us in it, you know.’

  ‘That was a one-off,’ I protested.

  ‘Is that right?’ he said, suddenly very sure of himself. ‘What about every time we’re just about to go out and we have the obligatory panic looking for your bag?’

  I hung my head.

  ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Maybe it’s upstairs in the bedroom, you say, and I say, When did you last see it? And you say, I can’t remember. And I talk you back through it and you eventually remember you had it in the kitchen. So do you know who always finds it? Me!’

  ‘OK,’ I admitted. ‘You’re right. I suppose this is what they mean when they say you have to work at marriage. We must both try harder to find our own things.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re married, we’re allowed to ask the other person to help us find things.’

  I was suddenly very taken with that idea.

  ‘Right, I get you,’ I said. ‘That’s what they mean when they say marriage is a partnership.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  And it’s not just the dynamic between the two of us that has changed. How the outside world perceives me is also different. Shortly after we got married, I rang him at work and a man’s voice said, ‘Who’s calling? Is that his wife?’

  My first instinct was to splutter, ‘His what? You mean he’s married? The dirty louser and he never told me. I never even suspected!’ Until I realized, with a shock, it was me the man was talking about. ‘Er, yes,’ I grinned coyly. ‘I suppose, now that you mention it, it is his wife.’

  And it took me about six months before I could say the words ‘my’ and ‘husband’ one after the other, without becoming slightly hysterical with laughter. It just struck me as a ridiculous thing to do. Saying ‘my husband’ felt like the emotional equivalent of dressing up in my mother’s clothes and shoes when I was a little girl. Fun to do, but I was fooling no one.

  Then, the whole financial aspect of being married is very weird. Obviously, when we got married, we – in theory, at least – merged both our properties. There was a part in the ceremony when we gave each other a little silver yoke and said, ‘Accept this little silver yoke, a token of all I possess.’ (Except when it came to my turn, I had to say, ‘Accept this little silver yoke, all I possess,’ because of my shocking skintness.) But while it’s very easy to preach joint ownership in the abstract, in practice it’s very difficult to cease being a fully self-supporting, self-governing autonomous monetary unit (in his case) or a human third-world country (in mine). It took a while for me to realize that as soon as I’d paid back one bank loan, it was no longer automatic to immediately apply for another.

  At first it was hard to break the habit of being financially independent. Doing the weekly shop was initially a minefield. We took it in turns to pay, me one week, him the next. And I used to get into a right yoomer whenever I felt that too many luxury goods were being purchased the week I had to pay. ‘Look at him,’ I’d think bitterly. ‘Firing family-sized packs of caviar into the trolley just because it’s my turn. And next week, when it’s his turn to cough up, we’ll be lucky to get away with a couple of dented cans of peas.’

  Until he reminded me that it actually doesn’t make any difference who pays for what. And that if I’m skint he’s happy to pay. He’s a very sensible, kind, patient man. And I finally think I’m getting the hang of this being married lark. We hardly ever argue – properly argue, as opposed to having stimulating, thought-provoking discussions about cufflinks and handbags. But the great thing is that when we do argue, we have very flexible boundaries within which to have the row – they’ll stretch, but won’t break. I like the feeling that we’ll both stick around to make sure it works.

  Mind you, now and then he still makes unusual requests of me.

  Like, one day he just turned round to me and out of the blue said, ‘Have you any stamps?’

  ‘Me?’ I looked around to see was there anyone else in the room he might be talking to. Because he surely couldn’t have meant me. ‘Why would I have stamps? You know me. You know how disorganized I am. I pride myself on it.’

  ‘I just thought you might,’ he said moodily. ‘In your purse.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said confidentially. ‘Did your mother always carry stamps in her purse?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said sullenly.

  ‘Well, I’m not your mother,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘Now, any chance of a lift into town?’

  ‘And I’m not your father,’ he replied. ‘Make your own bloody way.’

  First published in Image magazine, March 1997.

  You Can Run But You Can’t Hide

  I have a friend called Jenny. We’ve known each other a very long time, but since I moved back to live in Ireland we don’t see each other often. Recently I went to visit her in London and when I let myself in with the key she’d left out for me, I found her on the floor of her front room doing sit-ups. ‘Hiya,’ she called. ‘Just another sixty of these and I’ll be with you.’r />
  ‘Fine,’ I replied, easily. ‘I’ll just…’ I looked around for entertainment and spotted something interesting. ‘I’ll just read your credit-card bill.’

  That’s because Jenny is a Long-Term Friend. Someone I’ve known for so long that we don’t have to bother with any social niceties – like good manners!

  I only have a couple of LTFs: Jenny, who I’ve known since my teens, and Suzanne, who I’ve known since childhood. Suzanne also lives in London and I stayed with her about four months ago. Sometimes, other friends who haven’t seen me for a while make my arrival a major deal: they clean their flats, they cook meals, sometimes they even get the camera out and take photos. But Suzanne treats me as an extension of herself, we’re just straight in, exactly as it always was. There’s no awkwardness, no warm-up period, and no special treatment. Not only was her flat in a shambles (her own word), but she’d had no time to get any food in and the minute I was in the door I had to help her kill a bee that was marauding around her bathroom. No sooner was that done than she had to go to the post-office and the dry-cleaners, so I tagged along. Errand-running doesn’t belong in some friendships, but it does in this kind. There’s a real comfort in the ordinariness and timelessness of it.

  There are certain other characteristics that mark Long-Term Friendships as different to ones that you might have made when you were slightly older. For example, when I meet people on a social basis, I kiss them. It’s what’s expected, it’s what you do. But Suzanne and I can’t kiss each other – we just feel too stupid. Our friendship was cemented in the days when the customary form of greeting was to trip each other up or to administer a ‘dead arm’ – a powerful blow to the vaccination part of our upper arm. Kissing was simply a ridiculous cringy activity for film stars or grown-ups. Then, overnight, the world changed and we found ourselves in our twenties and suddenly, left, right and centre, people were planting sophisticated kisses on each other’s cheeks. Not to be found lacking in social graces, Suzanne and I rose to the occasion, and now we can work our way through a roomful of people, kissing as we go. Until we get to each other, then we hesitate, pull back, shake our heads and go, ‘Naaaaah!’ Then she tries to trip me up and I punch the top of her arm and – greetings having been formally exchanged – we move on to the next person, our lips puckered.