Well, that’s a bit of a sickener.
Perhaps my position should simply be gratitude to have had more than seventeen happy years with Hugh. Lately there’s been a plethora of articles that say there’s no such thing as ‘The One’ any more, but a succession of ‘Ones’. That every relationship has built-in obsolescence, that sooner or later it’ll run out of road and then it’s time to move on to the next person.
But contemplating that is just too depressing. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen, but why not defer the worry until it actually has?
And everything might be okay. People get through worse. Far, far worse. Resilience of the human spirit and all that blah.
12
Seventeen years ago
After I got pregnant with Kiara our lives changed with terrifying speed.
‘It’s time to go back to Ireland,’ Hugh said. ‘We’re a family now. We need to buy a place and we can’t afford London prices.’
We couldn’t really afford Irish prices either – the boom was still going strong. But if house prices were astronomical, so were wages. Jobs in PR were abundant, as you’d expect in an economy crammed with gleeful people only desperate to spend their new-found wealth. (Which wasn’t real, but none of us knew that at the time.)
Testing the waters, still very anxious about the hairpin turn my life was taking, I applied for two PR jobs in Dublin, and even when I ‘confessed’ to being pregnant, both companies were happy to employ me, let me leave to have Kiara, pay me for six months’ maternity leave, then take me back. Like I say, boomtown and that sort of thing so wouldn’t happen now.
These days, my friends of child-bearing age, who work for any sizeable company, tell me that life is like a dystopian novel, one where women have to swallow their pill in a public ceremony every morning in the workplace. (‘They watch you like a hawk. You can’t sneak off to puke from a hangover or put on even an ounce. If they suspect you’re pregnant, you’re immediately sidelined on to the worst project ever, to make you resign.’)
When I asked Hugh what he thought of his chances of getting a job in Dublin, he said, ‘Should be no bother.’ Then he went a little shifty. ‘For a couple of years myself and Carl have been talking about setting up our own studio. Maybe now is the time.’
‘How would it happen?’
‘We’d get a bank loan.’
‘At the same time as taking on a mortgage? Wouldn’t that put a lot of pressure on us?’
‘We can manage it,’ he said. ‘Just about.’
‘Grand, right, okay.’
‘And another good thing about moving back to Dublin,’ he said, ‘is that with us both working, we’ll have a network of support from our families.’
‘With my family I’m not sure that’s a good thing.’
He laughed. ‘C’mon, if we were ever stuck, Maura could pick up Neeve from school. If we limit her exposure to short bursts, she’ll survive the trauma. And Declyn can babysit, if we ever get to go out again. Then there’s my family.’
Oh! Hugh’s family! They were lovely.
His mum was warm, cuddly and a feeder; his dad was twinkly-eyed, easy-going and handy. He had a giant blue metal toolbox that opened out with accordion springs and within, organized with a logic and order that made my heart happy, was every tool anyone might ever need.
He was the opposite of Pop – all the pictures in our house hung crooked, if they hung at all, gnarly tangles of wire sprouted ominously from broken plug sockets, and his attempts to fix anything invariably ended with him losing his temper, flinging the tool and the incorrectly sized nail or Rawlplug to the floor, shouting, ‘You useless hoor of a thing!’ and stomping away.
Probably because of its age, things were always going wrong in our house – taps falling off, door hinges rotting, pieces of stucco falling from the ceiling into our dinner – but we learnt to not-see them. One winter, we also developed selective deafness. We’d be watching telly in the living room while the ancient radiator rattled as loudly as a jackhammer drilling into solid rock. The deafening juddering began every evening at five o’clock when the heating came on, but our solution was simply to turn the telly up to bellowing point because the alternative – Pop getting a spanner from the cutlery drawer, hitting the radiator with it until he’d managed to make everything worse, perhaps dislodging it from the wall and sending scalding rusty water spraying around the room (which happened when he ‘fixed’ the radiator in the hall) – was too much to contemplate.
If Mum was there for any of Pop’s handymannery, the soundtrack was of stifled laughter, but mostly my memories are of having a knot in my stomach. It’s hardly surprising that I have chronic gastritis now – and that I was in love with Hugh’s entire family: I used to fantasize about growing up in that kind of home.
In our house we lived on baked potatoes and beans because it was all Maura could make. But Hugh’s mum baked cakes and had a different dinner allocated to each day of the week. Sometimes I made Hugh recite it.
‘But you know it off by heart,’ he’d complain.
‘Ah, say it, Hugh!’
‘Okay. Sunday, roast chicken. Monday, curry made with the leftovers. Tuesday, stew. Wednesday, shepherd’s pie. Thursday, spaghetti. Friday, fish and chips and –’
‘On Saturday, cold meats and salad.’ I’d sigh with bliss.
‘But it was so boring, Amy, and Wednesdays were the pits because shepherd’s pie is the worst dinner ever.’
‘Can our life be like that?’ I asked. ‘When we move to Dublin and we’re a family and all grown-up?’
‘Mmmaybeeee. But no shepherd’s pie.’
‘Grand. No shepherd’s pie. But rigid routines, Hugh.’ I was gleeful with anticipation.
Carried on a tide of optimism, but woefully unprepared, we arrived in Dublin in 2000 and into the three-bedroom house in Dundrum where we still live now. Immediately I started my new job, where I found myself working with Tim and Alastair.
As well as having gorgeous parents, Hugh had two older brothers and one younger, all deliciously normal. Neeve was lovingly welcomed, even though she took pains to remind them, ‘You’re not my real granny. You’re not my real uncle.’
‘You’re right,’ Fake Granny Sandie or Fake Uncle Carl would say. ‘We know we’re not the real ones, but is it okay if we love you too?’
‘I suppose,’ Neeve would concede. ‘So long as you remember I’m a chip off the old block.’
(At that time, the only clothes Neeve would let us dress her in were the Rotherham United football kit – a red top, white shorts and red knee socks. Her red-gold hair was cropped and she looked so like Richie that sometimes people recognized him in her. A Rotherham youth in Dublin for a stag weekend declared, ‘It’s a Richie Aldin mini-me.’
‘He’s my daddy.’
‘I can tell, son. You’re a chip off the old block.’
Neeve whispered to me, ‘He thought I was a boy.’ She was buzzing. ‘What does the chip thing mean?’
For years when she was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Neeve would reply, ‘A professional football player, like my daddy.’)
To my heartbreak, Real Granny, Real Grandpa and Real Uncle Aldin resisted my attempts to introduce them to Neeve. Richie, still playing football for one of those up-north teams, had got married again and the Aldins seemed to have decided on collective amnesia regarding his first marriage. On behalf of Neeve, it was like razors across my soul.
Meanwhile, my brothers and sisters overran our lives, with well-intentioned but non-boundaried interference.
They gave practical help – dinners for the freezer, ladders and buckets to wallpaper the house, a loan of a car until we’d found time to buy our own. More importantly, they offered financial help because – who knew? – buying a house in the same month as setting up a recording studio could leave you perilously short of cash.