Under the Duvet Page 7

  Birthday presents are another area where a Long-Term Friendship is different to an ordinary one. With most friends, when your birthday is approaching, you can hint – heavily even – at what you’d like. But if you don’t like what you’re given, you pretend you do, because it’s the thought that counts, right? But with your LTF, there’s none of that altruism. They corner you and say, ‘Now look, I have to talk to you about my birthday present. We don’t want a repeat of what happened when I was twelve.’ And you bow your head and cringe at the memory of giving a twelve-year-old a jewellery kit that the box said was suitable for eight to eleven-year-olds. And it wasn’t even your fault because your mother had picked it.

  ‘Think Mac,’ your LTF advises. ‘Think lipstick.’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘This colour,’ she announces, pulling a lipstick from her bag and giving it to you. ‘You owe me fifteen quid.’

  Having a LTF makes for wonderful reminiscences – well, a different class of them, anyway. With other people, I remember old boyfriends, wild parties, the glorious summer of ’95, the shopping trip when we realized that flares were on the way back, the day we first used the word ‘partner’ to describe our blokes. But when Suzanne and I wander down memory lane, the conversation is more likely to go, ‘Do you remember the day we nearly drowned at Laragh?’

  ‘’Course I do. I was nine, wasn’t I?’

  ‘And your dad went mental.’

  ‘And so did yours.’

  ‘God, the laugh we had!’

  But the downside with LTFs is that you can get away with less. They know your patterns, so there’s nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. Many’s the time when I’ve made a dog’s dinner of my life, and tried to lessen the mortification and self-loathing by insisting, ‘This is the first time this has ever happened to me.’ Like it’s not my fault, you know? Like it’s just an unfortunate accident. And if someone hasn’t known me very long, they’ll believe me and rain down soothing sympathy, and lo and behold, I get the desired response and feel better. But it doesn’t happen with your LTFs. For example, when I got bollocked for being late for work, I complained at bitter length to Suzanne that I was actually a very punctual person and that I was nearly always early, and how unfair it all was, and anytime she wanted to join in and say how unfair it was too was fine with me. But instead of heaping scorn on my boss, she furrowed her brow ominously, then effortlessly retrieved a memory from sixteen years ago. ‘But what about the time you used to babysit for the Cartys? D’you ’member? You were so late that Mrs Carty had to get her sister to come instead and you were given the boot. D’you ’member? You were late for work then, too.’

  ‘That was different,’ I muttered.

  But I suppose it wasn’t. These friends have the large-scale map of who we really are. Which can sometimes be a right pain and, more often, can be strangely comforting…

  Previously unpublished.

  Bah! Givvus a Humbug

  I got married at Christmas. Not actually on the twenty-fifth of December, but four days later – in other words, as near as made no difference. It was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time. I was living in London, but getting married in Dublin, and a lot of people who were invited to the wedding were also living in London, but being ex-pats would be in Ireland over Christmas, partaking of the seasonal festivities with their families and ideally placed for a spot of wedding attendance. But what I hadn’t realized was that having a wedding at Christmas would have some unwelcome side-effects. And basically, what happened that year was that Christmas got cancelled in our house. The family diet had started six months earlier. I was home from London for the weekend and half-noticed that the dinner portions served up by my mother were sparser than the gargantuan spreads she usually produced. But it was when the meat and two veg were finished and the time for dessert rolled around that I noticed how bad things had got. Instead of flinging wide the freezer-door, like he always did, and shouting temptingly, ‘Magnum? Brunch? Wibbly Wobbly Wonder?’, my father switched on the kettle to make tea.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked. There was a chance, admittedly small, that they hadn’t been to the freezer centre and were currently out of their stockpile of ice-creams, but in that case why hadn’t they offered me bananas and custard?

  ‘We’re on a diet,’ my mother informed me. ‘I’m not having us looking like Billy and Bessie Bunter in your wedding photographs. We have to live with those images for all eternity, so we’re going to be fine and thin for them.’

  I stared at my father. Was it true? He had a healthy fondness for confectionery, surely he wouldn’t give in without a fight. But he just nodded sadly, like a broken man. ‘We don’t want to look like Billy and Bessie Bunter,’ he repeated, obviously brainwashed.

  With creeping foreboding, I clocked the warning signs. How could I not have noticed earlier? A carton of low-fat milk on the table. A tub of polyunsaturated spread by the bread. Horrified, I went to the high cupboard and opened it, desperate to be brained by the usual avalanche of Hobnobs, Jaffa Cakes, Boasters and Clubmilks. But nothing fell on to my head except some anaemic crumbs, which obviously belonged to some 33-per-cent-fat-reduced digestives.

  So it was true.

  And every weekend I came home after that it remained the same. My mother, a gentle and kind-hearted woman, can be a fairly formidable prospect once she gets the bit between her teeth. Rumours reached me – never confirmed, mind – that a Wagon-Wheel wrapper had been found in my father’s coat pocket. The implication being that he’d cracked under the low-fat regime in the homestead and had started playing away. But like I said, it was never confirmed.

  Anyway, Wagon-Wheels or no Wagon-Wheels, by the time Christmas rolled around, everyone was looking pretty svelte.

  I don’t know what kind of madness had overtaken me, but I thought that my mother would declare an armistice on the family diet for Christmas Day at least. Most Christmases you can hardly squeeze yourself into my parents’ house for boxes of biscuits, chocolates, twelve-packs of chip sticks, acres of cans of Budweiser and one pineapple. They are generous and convivial hosts. My father is a blur, as he marches between the boot of the car and the dining-room, heaving in yet another stack of biscuit tins, just one more armload of mixers. Traditionally, my mother surveys the mini off-licence in the sitting-room and says anxiously, ‘But will we have enough? What if someone calls?’

  However, this year it was Little-Match-Girl territory: the house seemed bleak, the cupboards seemed bare. (They weren’t really, of course, but all these things are relative.) And from the resentful looks my siblings kept shooting me, it was clear who they held responsible for this state of affairs.

  ‘No selection boxes!’ Caitríona yelled. ‘But how are we going to have the selection-box challenge without selection boxes?’ (The selection-box challenge, a game for two or more players, involves eating the contents of a selection box against the clock. An old favourite of mine, and one that I’m actually extremely good at.)

  ‘Play it with apples instead,’ my poor father suggested, quailing from the black looks we threw him.

  ‘Christmas is about more than selection boxes,’ Mam dared to suggest. More black looks. (If it hadn’t been for the industrial-sized tin of Roses that my boss had given me, I don’t know what I would have barricaded myself into my bedroom with on Christmas Eve.)

  Two nights before the wedding, on the twenty-seventh of December, my mother held a do in the house. It was a bonding exercise with Himself’s family. As the in-laws are English, my parents felt the full rigours of Irish hospitality weighing heavy on their (by now) slender shoulders. Suddenly all this food and drink appeared from nowhere.

  The kitchen table, which hadn’t seen much action in the last while, was transformed into a vision of delicious nosh, both savoury and sweet – biscuits, smoked salmon on brown bread, cashew nuts, pastries, quiche, mini-sandwiches and a pineapple. The worktops were a veritable hive of activity, with my father jabbing
sticks into cocktail sausages and my mother slicing a Christmas cake that had miraculously materialized.

  ‘Where’ve you been hiding all this?’ Tadhg demanded.

  ‘In the car,’ my poor mother said sheepishly. Then she admonished, ‘No!’ as he tore open a bag of nuts and began to tip them into his mouth, as though drinking from a bottle. ‘They’re for the visitors!’

  ‘It’s the least you can let me have,’ he challenged. ‘After you’ve practically STARVED us all Christmas.’

  (I digress here, but I’d love to know exactly what triggers grown adults to behave like spoilt brats as soon as they spend more than half an hour under their parents’ roof. Even now I can’t stop doing it.)

  The English visitors duly arrived, and were wheeled into the kitchen to meet my siblings for the first time. Tadhg nodded and beamed with his mouth shut, but didn’t actually speak, hindered as he was by the slice of quiche he’d crammed into his mouth but hadn’t had time to swallow while Mam had been answering the door.

  Throughout the evening, my mother patrolled as much as she could, but she couldn’t be everywhere at once and I managed to secrete a box of Chocolate Kimberleys out of the kitchen and spirit them up to my bedroom, where Caitríona and I had a brief but satisfying biscuit-eating frenzy.

  The following morning the fear kicked in. The mud-wrap I’d had to slim away the Roses had been worse than useless and I was terrified that my Chocolate-Kimberley orgy had entirely put the mockers on me sliding into my wedding dress.

  It was touch and go – the zip was very reluctant to go up all the way. But everything went fine on the day and I have some lovely photos of my mam and dad. They’re like stick insects (nearly).

  First published in Irish Tatler, December 1999.

  Himself is a Hooligan

  Himself likes football. That’s because he’s a man. I don’t like football. That’s because I’m a woman. Although I pretend I love it. That’s because I’m a modern woman.

  When Himself declared his interest in the game, it came as a bit of a shock. He’s a mild-mannered man with more than a passing fondness for classical music and jazz. And between yourselves and myself, jazz was the thing that I saw as storing up trouble for the future.

  I hate jazz and make no bones about it. I just don’t get it. I hate the unpredictability of it, all that self-indulgent meandering. What I’d like to know is, where’s the chorus? What’s wrong with having a rhythm? I want something I can tap my foot to without seeming as if I’m trying to send a message in morse code.

  The football problem turned out to be more acute than I’d initially thought. It transpired that he does more than just like football in the abstract. He has a team that he follows and has done since he was a small boy. (Not one of your glamour teams, but a success-challenged crew called Watford.) He goes to their matches, is joyous and ecstatic when they win; moody, sullen and uncommunicative when they don’t. He has high hopes that our unconceived son will play for them.

  He even buys the crappy merchandise. Their ground is in a place called Vicarage Road and I am the unproud owner of a pair of alarmingly expensive, red, synthetic knickers with the words ‘I scored at Vicarage Road’ written across the front.

  I didn’t want to be one of those cardigan-wearing, wifey types who click their tongue and throw their eyes skyward every time football is mentioned. At least I wanted to pretend I wasn’t. With a horrible sense of foreboding, I realized I’d have to make a bit of an effort.

  Luckily, on account of football being the new rock ’n’ roll, I knew the basics when I met him. (Although times have moved on, and now that comedy is the new football maybe the rest of you can all stop faking interest in the sport soon. You lucky articles.) So I already knew that Man United wear red shirts, that Ooh Ah Cantona was probably a worry to his mother, and that the one with his eyes too close together, giving him the aspect of a village idiot, was Ryan Giggs. I understood that I was supposed to fancy him. What I didn’t understand was why.

  Unfortunately, when Himself talked about football it wasn’t the fancyability or otherwise of Ryan Giggs that he wanted to discuss. It was all a lot more technical than that. So I forced myself to learn. I asked questions and managed to listen to the answers without going into a boredom-triggered coma. And now, God love me, I understand the rules. I can bandy about expressions like ‘penalty area’ and ‘we was robbed’ with the best of them. I have even been initiated into that innermost sanctum, the holiest of holies, by knowing what the offside rule means.

  The only problem is, despite my wealth of knowledge, I still don’t like football. The urge to click my tongue and throw my eyes skyward every time it’s mentioned is still sore upon me.

  After we’d been going with each other a while, he asked me to go to a match with him. ‘It’s not every girl I’d bring to a match,’ he said fondly. I smiled tightly. I agreed to go for three reasons and three reasons only. 1) I loved him. 2) He promised to buy me chips on the walk from the pub to the ground. 3) I was let off having to go and see a jazz saxophonist at Ronnie Scott’s, a musician who’d been ominously described as ‘a purist’.

  And what a revelation that match was. The atmosphere was disconcertingly tribal and primitive. There was so much testosterone in the air that it was a wonder I didn’t grow a beard. But worst of all was the change in me laddo – by day a mild-mannered computer analyst, but on Saturday afternoons at football matches…

  Who was this snarling animal beside me, his face contorted with hate, who bellowed tunelessly, ‘YOU’RE SHIT AND YOU KNOW YOU ARE’ at the faceless supporters at the far end of the pitch? I was horrified. And worse was to come. ‘Come on,’ he said, elbowing me. ‘Why aren’t you singing? Join in. You’re shiiiit and you know you…’

  The unpalatable truth is that his team aren’t very good. They’re in the first division, which anyone in the know knows is actually the second division. I went to a couple more matches and I was in an agony of frustration because the eejits wouldn’t score. They’d get all the way to the net and then they’d hang around shyly, like an adolescent boy trying to pluck up the courage to ask a girl to dance. ‘After you,’ they cordially invited their team-mates with a flourish. ‘No, I insist, after you.’ Fear of success, I diagnosed.

  I put a proposition to Himself. ‘Can we support someone else? Someone who wins occasionally?’

  He was outraged. He spluttered and stuttered about loyalty and steadfastness, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. ‘You can’t choose who to support,’ he scolded. ‘It’s something you’re born to, it’s thrust upon you, you have no say in the matter.’

  ‘It’s only a football team,’ I muttered. ‘Not your destiny.’

  ‘And exactly who were you thinking of switching your allegiance to?’ he sneered.

  ‘Well, er…’ I said, suddenly not so sure of myself. I hadn’t been expecting such a violent response. ‘I was thinking maybe of Man United…’

  ‘Man United!’ His face was a picture of disgust. ‘That crowd of tossers.’ It’s really quite astonishing how many people despise Man United and all their works. ‘The only people who support them know nothing about football,’ he spat. Well, that suited me perfectly.

  But the worst thing of all about football is that it gets under your skin. Even when you don’t want it to. Even when you fight it. Because the last time I was at a match and ‘their’ side matched ‘ours’ in repeatedly failing to kick the ball into the back of the net, I was appalled to find that the person lustily leading the singing, to the tune of One Packie Bonner, of ‘… SCORE IN A BROTHEL, YOU COULDN’T SCORE IN A BROTHEL’ was me.

  First published in Irish Tatler, November 1997.

  Push!

  Until recently, I knew no one who had a baby. The closest I got was occasionally when a friend of a friend got up the duff. But they were always organized, bossy women who wore Alice bands and yellow cotton trousers, and who seemed to strongly disapprove of me.

  ‘Oh, so-and-so
is up the pole,’ my friend would say. And I’d murmur some platitude while thinking that – like Formula One engines or the mating habits of humming birds – pregnant women had simply nothing to do with me.

  But the whole process moved a huge jump closer when my friends began having babies. And suddenly the net tightened even further by me becoming so outrageously broody that I’m a danger to myself and others.

  I look at a baby and my womb twangs. Literally starts lepping around looking for a bit of baby-carrying action. Out of the blue I have empathy with those women who steal babies from prams left outside newsagents. If I pass a pushchair in the street I go all gooey. Starry-eyed, I ask Himself, ‘Did you see the beautiful baby?’ ‘No,’ he usually replies, very, very firmly.

  My reactions to the idea of pregnancy are mixed. On the one hand, it’d be lovely to eat for two. Not that I don’t anyway, but it would be nice not to feel guilty about it. On the other hand, I’ve spent my entire life trying to refashion my body into something I can look at without wincing. Pregnancy would put the final kibosh on that dream, because I’m the kind of person who’d put on four stone during the nine months, and never be able to lose them again.

  Another impediment to my desire to get pregnant is my dreadful cowardice. I’m baffled why something as allegedly natural as childbirth should hurt so much. Mother Nature must have had an off day – been out on the rip the night before, maybe – when she sat at the drawing-board and invented the ins and outs of giving birth. I mean, it doesn’t make sense. It’s the biological equivalent of painting oneself into a corner. Yes, Mother Nature, I can see how it gets in all right, no complaints there, but you’re impressing no one with your plan for getting it back out again.