‘It doesn’t have to suit me,’ I say. ‘I’d be happy with anything.’
She flicks a meaningful look at Hugh. ‘That’s obvious.’
Before words of protest can leave my mouth, Neeve and Sofie zip from the house. Hugh mutters, ‘I’ll just …’ and disappears upstairs, leaving Kiara and me sitting looking at one another.
9
‘Wow,’ Kiara says. ‘Big shock.’
And now I’m raging. Neeve and Sofie had shitty starts to life, but everything had gone smoothly for Kiara. This shouldn’t be about me, but Kiara was my clean sheet, my success story, and now Hugh has besmirched that too. ‘I’m so sorry, sweetie,’ I say. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I meant, big shock for you.’
‘No, no, no –’
‘I’m good,’ she says. ‘I understand that Dad needs to do this. It’s you I’m worried for.’
‘Kiara …’ Sometimes Kiara seems more mature than all of us but a lot of that is probably just surface and it would be a mistake to start relying on it.
‘Mum, I’m fine. But you’re going to need a strategy for the next six months. You should take up rock-climbing.’
‘Why?’
‘Okay, maybe not rock-climbing. I’m just throwing suggestions out there. But there must be tons of things you wish you’d done with your life and now’s your chance!’
God. All I want to do is go to bed for six months and subsist on Sugar Puffs eaten straight from the box. Instead I’m going to have to make new memories, be my best self, do one thing that scares me every day and all that other proactive stuff that pervades Kiara’s thinking.
‘Like, if you died tomorrow,’ she prompts, ‘what would you regret not having done?’
This is bullshit. I’m the adult here, she’s the child: I’m the one who should be providing comfort and solutions.
‘There must be something, Mum.’
Maybe it’s the stress but I can think of only one thing. Since I’ve given up the cigarettes, I’ve put on a couple of pounds. And when you’re as short as me, every ounce shows. I haven’t adjusted to my new weight and I don’t want to – this isn’t the real me.
‘I’d regret not getting thin again,’ I say. ‘I’d hate to die being the wrong size. I feel that I wouldn’t be able to properly enjoy the afterlife – it’d be a bit like going on a hike with a gritty little stone trapped in one of my boots.’
Kiara’s smile wobbles. This clearly isn’t worthy. Then she recovers. ‘Boom,’ she says. ‘There you go. Eat clean, right?’
‘Sweet-potato toast,’ I say. ‘Unless sweet-potato toast is over already?’
‘It’s still a thing.’
I wasn’t sure it was, but Kiara was kind.
‘Maybe you could talk to Urzula,’ she suggests.
‘Maybe,’ I muttered.
‘Aaaaand maybe not.’
Sofie’s mum Urzula is a self-made diet guru, who pops up with increasing regularity on TV, both here in Ireland and in the UK. She has no qualifications, but her icy Baltic thinness and her cruel Latvian-accented judgements are garnering a growing following of people who celebrate her tough-love, sock-it-to-the-fatsos bluntness. She’s obsessed with fighting lard. In my opinion, she’s simply managed to convert her eating disorder into a career.
‘Urzula has ice in her soul,’ I say.
‘No,’ Kiara says. ‘Urzula has a level teaspoon of millet porridge in her soul.’
We share a laugh and Kiara goes off.
Now that the girls have been told and it’s all official, I do what I should have done days ago and ring Derry. ‘I’ve something weird to tell you.’ I take a deep breath. ‘Hugh is sort of leaving me. For six months,’ I add quickly. ‘Then he’s coming back. But while he’s gone, it’ll be like he’s single.’
For a moment she’s silent. Then, ‘Where are you? At home? I’ll be round in ten.’
It’s probably less than eight minutes later that her car hares into our estate, and comes to a sudden halt just outside the gate. In she sweeps, half of her hair in a bouncy New York blow-dry and the other half still wet.
‘Aw, Derry, for the love of God, you didn’t have to leave mid-blow-dry.’
‘I’m tight on time. Tell me.’
Haltingly, I outline the facts.
‘And this happened when?’
‘Last Sunday night.’
‘And you didn’t tell me because … it was too weird? You were too humiliated? You were hoping he’d change his mind?’
‘All of the above.’
‘Jesus Christ, Amy, you poor little baba.’ She looks at me with heartfelt sincerity. ‘You have shitey luck with husbands.’
‘But he swears he’s coming back.’
Her expression says it all: even if Hugh comes back, everything will be different. No way can he simply slot back in and take up where he left off.
‘Amy, you’re a survivor.’ She’s firm on this and, yes, I appear to be – I survived Richie leaving, I survived all the tricks he played on Neeve, I survived the Exorcist-level bile of Neeve’s teens, I survived two catastrophic redundancies, one long ago in London, another more recently in Dublin.
But being a survivor is hard bloody work, harder than it looks, and I think I might be running low on survivor juice. Given the choice, I’d far rather a pampered life of indulgence where nothing bad ever happens.
‘How can I help?’ She’s always proactive.
‘By letting me vent. And please don’t make me go on dates. I want nothing to do with men, not now, not ever.’
‘But what about that –’
‘Derry, please! That was a moment of lunacy.’
‘But you could finish what you st–’
‘I’m begging you, Derry, never, ever mention that, like ever. Please.’ There’s a danger I might cry. ‘I just want to bunker down for the six months, keep a low profile and see what things are like when Hugh comes back.’
‘When’s he going?’
‘Soon. In the next week, that sort of soon.’
She’s biting her bottom lip. ‘Lookit,’ she says, ‘I’m meant to be flying to Cape Town today.’ Derry works in human resources; it involves a lot of travel. ‘But I could try and cancel if –’
‘Derry, don’t be mad. Anyway, he’ll be gone for six fecking months. You can’t cancel all of your trips.’
‘But who’s going to mind you if he goes this week? Maura will make it all about her. Jesus, though, she’ll go baloobas when she hears …’ She notices my expression. ‘Wait, what, she knows?’
‘Sorry, Der. She guessed something was up. She came into work yesterday and leant on me till I confessed.’
‘The Waterboarder strikes again.’
‘To be fair, she wasn’t unsympathetic.’
‘But, still, she’ll be fuck all use if thing go nuclear. What about Steevie? Is she still AMAB?’
I nod. AMAB stands for ‘All Men Are Bastards’.
‘Could that be a good thing? The pair of you can make little wax men and get out the needles … no?’
‘No. It sounds mad but Hugh can’t help this.’
Derry is incredulous. ‘Hugh is a total dick. I love him, you know I do, but he’s being a total dick.’ She looks confused. ‘Why don’t you hate him?’
‘I do hate him. Sometimes. Well, all the time …’ Then I explode, ‘Why couldn’t he have stuck to the promise he made when we got married? Why does he have to be so weak?’ Before she can reply, I go on, ‘Or am I the weak one, letting him go off like this? Would another woman have insisted on the full terms of our marriage contract? “For better, for worse”?’
‘Yeah, your words, asshat!’
‘But making him stay wouldn’t work, Derry. He’s been miserable and emotionally unavailable.’
‘He’s a dick.’
‘But, Derry, I still love him. And I feel sorry for him. It’s a mess.’
‘Oh-kay.’ It takes a moment. ‘I think I get it.’ So that wouldn’t be her response but she’s working hard to align her opinions with mine. ‘Holding two opposite and opposing thoughts at once. No one ever said this life business would be easy. So who else can help? What about that half-wit Jana Shanahan?’
I snort with unexpected laughter. Derry can’t abide Jana: where I see sweetness, she sees profound silliness. She once said about Jana, ‘The wheel’s still spinning but the hamster’s looong goooone.’
‘Would she be any good in a crisis?’ There’s huge doubt in Derry’s voice. ‘I think she’s as useful as Pinterest but you’re fond of her.’