Watermelon Page 6

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-respect. 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 informed 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 associating 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. 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 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 list of unforgivable things. As it was, the chances of procuring even an alcoholic 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 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. Glo
rious 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 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 eighteen.”

  I was surly and sullen and silent. I hung my head to hide my shame and my fury at being caught.

  Dad was silent and sad.

  A purge ensued. The alcohol was all rounded up and incarcerated. De-tained without trial in a secure cupboard that had a key. Only Mum knew where that key was kept, and as she said herself, she would rather suffer the torments of the damned than reveal its whereabouts.

  Naturally it was only a matter of time before myself or one of my sisters figured out how to pick the lock.

  A type of guerrilla warfare ensued, with my mother forever seeking new hiding places for the rapidly diminishing supply of alcohol. In fact, Helen swears that she heard Mum on the phone to Auntie Julia, who is an alcoholic, asking her to recommend good hiding places. But this has never been corroborated, so don’t take it as gospel.

  But Mum was only ever a tiny step ahead of us. No sooner had she found a new place for her cache than one of us would find it. In the same way that new antibiotics have to be constantly invented to combat new and resistant strains of bacteria, so Mum had to constantly invent new hiding places. Unfortunately for her, they never stayed new or hidden for long.

  She even tried sitting down and reasoning with us. “Please don’t drink so much. Or at least please don’t drink so much of my and your father’s alcohol.”

  And the answer she usually got—uttered more in sorrow than in anger, I have to say—would be something like, “But Mum, we like to drink. We are poor. We are left with no choice. Do you think we enjoy behaving like common thieves?”

  Now, even though Margaret, Rachel and I had left home and could afford to support whatever bad habits we chose, Helen and Anna were both still living at home and were bone-crunchingly poor. So the battle continued.

  And what was once a proud and noble alcohol collection was now a tatty and raggedy and depleted few bottles traveling nomadically around the closets and cellars and under the beds, looking for a safe haven. Long gone were the full and sparkling bottles of spirits with recognizable brand names.

  All that remained in their stead were a sticky bottle of Drambuie, covered in dust, with about an inch left in the bottom, or half an inch of Cuban vodka (honestly, there is such a thing—obviously the right drink for the ideologically sound comrade in Cuba) and the almost full bottle of banana schnapps, which Helen and Anna have both declared that they would rather die of thirst than drink.

  I continued to sit on the cold floor in the dark hall. I really felt as if I needed a drink. I would even have drunk the banana schnapps if I’d known where to find it. I felt so unbearably lonely. I toyed with the idea of waking my mother up and asking her to give me a drink, but I felt really guilty at that idea. She was so worried about me, if the poor woman had managed to get to sleep I couldn’t in all conscience wake her.

  Maybe Helen could help.

  I wearily climbed the stairs to her bedroom. But when I crept into her room her bed was empty. Either she had spent the night at Linda’s or else some young man had got very lucky. If she had spent the night with a man, his suicided body would probably be found in the morning with a note beside it saying something like “I have achieved everything I ever wanted to do in life. I will never be as happy as this ever again. I want to die on this note of ecstasy. PS: She is a Goddess.” Then, as if I wasn’t feeling awful enough, I was suddenly gripped with a panicky fear that something terrible had happened to Kate.

  That she’d been the victim of crib death. Or choked on vomit. Or suffocated. Or something.

  I raced back to my room and I was so relieved to find that she was still breathing.

  She was just lying there, a wrinkled, pink, fragrant bundle, her eyes screwed shut.

  As I waited for my breathing to return to normal and for the sweat to evaporate from my forehead I wondered how other parents coped. How did they let their children out to play with other children? Didn’t they panic every time they were away from their children for more than five minutes?

  I was finding it hard enough now. How the hell would I cope when she had to go to school? There was no way I could be expected to just abandon her like that. The school would have to let me sit at the back of the classroom.

  Now I really needed a drink.

  Maybe Anna was home.

  I dragged myself over to her room and quietly opened the door.

  The fumes hit me instantaneously.

  The alcohol fumes, that is.

  Bingo!

  “Thank God,” I thought. I’d obviously come to the right place.

  Anna was curled up in bed, her long black hair spread out all around her on the pillow.

  “Anna,” I whispered loudly to her, and shook her a bit.

  No response.

  “Anna!” I whispered, a good deal more loudly this time, and shook her shoulder vigorously.

  I turned on her bedside lamp and shone it into her face, Gestapo style.

  Wake up!

  She opened her eyes and stared at me.

  “Claire?” she croaked disbelievingly.

  She looked really quite frightened, as though she thought she might be hallucinating.

  And as this was Anna, it was quite possible. That she was hallucinating, that is.

  Fond of the mood-altering substances, if you follow me.

  The poor girl. As far as she knew I was four hundred miles away, in another city, in another life. But here I was manifesting myself in her bedroom in the middle of the night.

  “Anna, sorry to disturb you like this but have you anything I could drink?” I asked her.

  She just stared at me.

  “Why are y
ou here?” she asked in a little frightened voice.

  “Because I’m looking for a bloody drink,” I said exasperatedly.

  “Have you a message for me?” she asked, still staring at me wide-eyed.

  “Oh Christ,” I thought in annoyance.

  Anna loved anything to do with the occult. There was nothing she would like more than to be possessed by the devil. Or to live in a haunted house.

  Or to be able to foretell disasters. She was obviously hoping that I was some kind of paranormal phenomenon. Either that or she was drunker than usual.

  “Yes, Anna,” I said, deciding to humor her but at the same time feeling a bit foolish. “They have sent me. I’ve been sent to get the drink.”

  “In my backpack,” she said faintly.

  Her backpack was flung on the floor with one shoe (what had happened to the other one?), her coat and a can of Budweiser. I had difficulty opening the bag as two helium balloons were attached to the cord. Anna had obviously been to some kind of party.

  I nearly cried with relief when I found a bottle of white wine in her bag.

  “Thanks, Anna,” I said. “I’ll repay you tomorrow.” And left.

  She was still looking dazed and frightened. She nodded dumbly. “Okay,”

  she managed to mumble.

  I checked Kate. She was still sleeping peacefully.

  I had half expected her to be sitting up with her arms folded, demanding to know where the father I had promised her was. But she was just asleep dreaming baby dreams about pink clouds and warm beds and soft people who smell nice and lots to eat and lots of sleep and lots of people who love you.

  And never having to line up for the bathroom.

  I took the bottle of wine downstairs to the kitchen and wearily opened it. I knew I would feel better after having a drink. Just as I was pouring myself a glass of wine, Anna appeared at the kitchen door, rubbing her eyes, looking confused and anxious, her long black hair strewn around her white face.

  “Oh, Claire, it really is you. So I didn’t imagine it,” she said, sounding half relieved, half disappointed. “I thought I might have the DTs. And then I thought you might be a vision. But I thought if you were a vision that you would appear in something nicer than Mum’s awful nightgown.”