Angels (4 page)

called Damian—spotted me smuggling my boyfriend back out. I'll never forget it: Damian was standing at the top of the stairs and his expression was deeply malevolent. I was never asked to babysit there again. (To be honest, it was nearly a relief.) But since then I had never been fired. I was a pretty good worker—not so good that I was ever in danger of winning the employee-of-the-month award—but fairly reliable and productive.

“You want me to go?” I asked faintly.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Now would be good.”

Oddly enough, it was losing my job that finally made me decide to leave Garv. I don't really understand why. Because, you know, it's not easy to leave someone. Not in real life. In fiction it's all so cut and dried and clear: if you can see no future together, then of
course
you'd leave. Simple. Or if he's having an affair, then you'd be a total idiot to stay, right?

But in real life it's amazing the things that conspire to keep you together. You might think, okay, so we can't seem to make each other happy anymore, but I get along so well with his sister and my friends are so fond of him that our lives are too interwoven for us to be able to extricate ourselves. And this is our house, and see those lupines in our little back garden? I planted them. (Well, not planted
planted
, I didn't actually put them in the ground with my own hands, it was a weird old man we hired named Michael who did, but I masterminded the whole thing.) Leaving someone is a big deal. I was walking away from a lot more than a person; it was an entire life I was saying good-bye to.

But the shock of losing my job had triggered the conviction that everything was falling apart. Once the door to one disaster had opened, the possibilities for catastrophe seemed open-ended and I felt I'd no choice but to go along with my ANGELS / 23

life as it unraveled. Losing a job? Why not go for broke and lose a marriage as well? Ours had suffered so many body blows during the past months, it was over in all but name anyway.

By the time Garv came home from work, I was in the bedroom, waist-high in a pathetic attempt at packing. How anyone manages to do a midnight flit is beyond me. Most people (if they're anything like me) accumulate so much
stuff
.

He stood and looked at me and it was like I was dreaming the whole thing.

He seemed surprised. Or maybe not. “What's going on?”

This was my cue for the dramatic exit lines people always deliver in fiction. I'm
leaving
you! It's OVER.

Instead I hung my head and mumbled, “I think I'd better go.

We've tried our best with this and…”

“Right.” He swallowed. “Right.” Then he nodded, and the nod was the worst part. Such resignation in it. He agreed with me, it seemed.

“I lost my job today.”

“Christ. What happened?”

“I've been distracted, and I've also taken too much sick leave.”

“Bastards.”

“Yeah, well.” I sighed. “The thing is, I mightn't make this month's mortgage, so I'll give it to you from my Ladies' Nice Things account.”

“Forget it, forget it. I'll take care of it.”

Then we lapsed into silence and it became clear that the mortgage was all he was planning to take care of.

Maybe I should have been angry with him and truffle woman.

Perhaps I should have despised him for not jumping into the breach and promising me passionately that he wouldn't let me go, and that we could work it out.

But the truth was, right then, I
wanted
to go.

MAINTENANCE-LEVEL DYSFUNCTIONAL
. That's how I'd like to describe my family, the Walshes. Well, actually, that's not how I'd
like
to describe my family. I'd
like
to describe my family as the prototype for the Brady Bunch. I'd
like
to describe my family as the Waltons of Walton's Mountain. But alas, maintenance-level dysfunctional is as good as it gets.

I have four sisters and the credo that each of them seems to live her life by is The More Dramas the Better. (Sample thereof. Claire's husband left her the day she'd given birth to their first child; Rachel is a [recovered] addict; Anna doesn't really
do
reality; and Helen, the youngest, well, it's kind of hard for me to describe…) But I've never been fond of chaos and I couldn't figure out why I was so different. In my lonelier moments, I used to entertain a fantasy that I was adopted. Which I could never truly relax into because it was obvious from my appearance that I was
one of them
.

My sisters and I come in two versions: Model A and Model B.

The As are tall, wholesome-looking, and, if left unchecked, have brick-shit-house tendencies. I am a text-book Model A. My eldest sister, Claire, and the sister next in line to me, Rachel, are also Model As.

Model Bs, on the other hand, are small, kitten-cute and gorgeous.

With their long dark hair, slanty green eyes, and slender limbs, the two youngest sister, Anna and Helen, are both clear-cut examples of the genre. Though Anna is nearly

ANGELS / 25

three years older than Helen, they look almost like twins. Sometimes even our mother can't tell them apart—although that's probably as much to do with her not wearing her glasses as their appearance, now that I come to think of it. To make it easy, Anna—a neo-hip-pie—dresses as though she's been rummaging through the dressing-up box. Helen is the one with the air of psychosis.

Model As share the common characteristics of being tall and strong. Not necessarily fat. Not
necessarily
. Indeed, Model As have been known to look willowy and slender. If they're in the grip of anorexia, that is—not as unlikely as it sounds. It's certainly happened, although not, sadly, to me. I'd never really had an eating disorder; apparently I didn't have the imagination, Helen told me.

However, I mightn't have an eating disorder, but I suspected I had a mild problem with another form of bulimia—shopping bulimia. It seemed as if I was always splurging on stuff, then trying to return it. In fact it had recently caused a huge argument that involved most of my family. Helen had been lamenting about how hard it was to live on what she got paid as a makeup artist when she suddenly rounded on me and said, accusingly, “You're good with money.”

This happened a lot; they referred to me as clean living and sporty—even though I hadn't played any sports since living in Chicago—and painted a picture of me that was years, probably decades, out of date. My parents wholly approved of this sepia-tinted version of me, but my younger sisters—affectionately, mind—treated me as a figure of fun. Most of the time I humored them, but that particular day I suddenly balked against being—af-fectionately, of course—depicted as life-crushingly dull.

“In what way am I good with money?”

“Not living beyond your means. Thinking carefully before you buy stuff, that sort of thing,” Helen said scathingly.

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be, hahaha.”

“I'm not good with money,” I said sharply.

26 / MARIAN KEYES

“You are!” they chorused—my parents with admiration, Helen without.

“She's not,” Garv said.

“Thank you,” I said, turning briefly to him.

“You are so! I bet you've a huge stash of cash in a cookie tin under your bed.”

“She wouldn't keep it in a cookie tin,” Dad said, defending me against Helen. “You don't get any interest in cookie tins. She has her savings in a high-interest account.”

“What savings? I don't have any savings!”

“But you've a pension fund?” Dad asked anxiously.

“That's different, that's not savings and you don't get it till you're sixty. And I'm
always
buying things I don't need.”

“Then you take them back.”

“But they don't always give refunds. Sometimes they only give store credits, so that's the same as spending money.” My voice was rising. “And sometimes they go out of date before I use them.”

“No!” Mum was appalled.

“Well, I bet you pay your credit card off in full every month,”

Helen persisted.

“I DON'T pay my credit card off in full every month.” They were all slightly openmouthed at my unexpected fury. “Only SOME

MONTHS!”

“Oh, rock ‘n’
roll
.”

I knew it was a little strange to be having this argument, I knew people argued about money—but usually they were being accused of spending too much and insisting that they didn't, not the other way round. So overwrought was I that eventually Mum made Helen apologize. Then she murmured to me, “It's nothing to be ashamed of, earning good money and putting some away.”

It was at that point that Garv made me leave, furious that they'd upset me so. (You know the way Garv sees the good in most people? Well, he suspends such altruism around most of my family.) On the drive home, I said anxiously, “I know everything ANGELS / 27

is relative and I know I'm not in their league, but I
am
neurotic, aren't I? I'm not a totally plain-vanilla, well-adjusted good girl?”

“Of course you're neurotic,” he said stoutly. “Don't mind them!”

However, I'm not dwelling on my family in this manner just to provide background color; there's actually a reason for it. It's because I'm about to resume living with them.

I
could
have moved in with Donna except she'd recently managed to get on-again-off-again-I'll-just-get-my-head-out-of-my-arse-if-you'll-give-me-a-second Robbie to live with her, so I wasn't sure she'd welcome the presence of a third party. Or I could have asked Sinead except Dave had kicked her out and she was currently even more homeless than me. And I could have tried my best friend, Emily, who has
plenty
of room. The only problem is that she lives in Los Angeles. Not exactly handy.

So, cap in hand, I have to return to the bosom of my family.

First, though, I have to tell them why and I'm dreading it.

Perhaps it's never easy to disappoint your parents, but in my case it feels extra difficult. I'm the one who married her first boyfriend and they've been so heartbreakingly proud of me and of the ticks beside almost every item on the checklist: the marriage, the house, the car, the job, the pension plan, the robust mental health.

“You've never given us a moment's worry,” they've often said.

“The only one who hasn't.” Then would follow a baleful look at whichever of my sisters was giving them grief at the time. Now, after successfully avoiding them for all those years, it was
my
turn for the baleful looks.

I paused at the front door before letting myself in. Just taking a moment. Filled with a fierce need to run away, leave the country, avoid facing my atrocious failure Then, with a sigh, I shoved my key in the lock. I couldn't run away—I'm responsible and conscientious. In a family where several 28 / MARIAN KEYES

black sheep are jockeying for position, being the sole white sheep isn't much fun.

There was a racket coming from the television room and it sounded like all those currently domiciled in the house—Mum, Dad, Helen, and Anna—were actually present.

Helen, at twenty-five, still lived at home because of her on-off relationship with gainful employment—she's had many career changes. Two or three years had been spent wasting time at college, and after a spell of unemployment she'd tried to be a flight attendant but couldn't manage to be pleasant enough. (“Stop ringing that fucking call bell, I heard you the first time,” was, I believe, the sentence that ended her highflying career.) More unemployment followed, then she took an expensive course as a makeup artist, but she'd hoped to work in theater and film and instead ended up doing wedding after wedding after wedding—mostly the daughters of my parents' friends. But Mum's efforts to drum up work for Helen weren't appreciated and, in high dudgeon, she told me that Helen had sworn that if she ever had to make up another six-year-old flower girl, she'd gouge her eyes out with her taupe eyeliner.

(It wasn't clear whether she was talking about her own eyes or the flower girl's.)

Helen's problem is that she's burdened with high intelligence coupled with an unfeasibly short attention span and she has yet to find her true calling.

Unlike Anna, who has yet to find
any
calling, true or otherwise.

She's resisted any encouragement to embark on a career path and has eked out a living waitressing, bartending, and reading tarot cards. Never for any sustained period, mind; her CV is probably as long as
War and Peace
.

Until she and her ex-boyfriend Shane had split up, they'd lived a hand-to-mouth, free-spirited existence. They were the type who'd pop out for ten minutes to buy a Kit Kat and the next time you'd hear from them they'd be in Istanbul, working in a tannery.

Their motto was “God will provide,” and even if God wouldn't, the dole did.

ANGELS / 29

I'd envied them their devil-may-care existence. Actually, that's a complete lie. I'd have hated it—the insecurity, never knowing if you could eat, buy exfoliator, that sort of thing.

The thing about Anna is that she can be acutely, almost shockingly, perceptive, but she's not great on practical things. Like remembering to get dressed before leaving the house, that sort of thing. There was a time when we felt her sweet, absent nature was caused by her fondness for recreational drugs, but she kicked that habit about four years ago, around the same time that Rachel did.

And though she's possibly a little more lucid than she used to be, I couldn't say for sure.

She'd moved back in with my parents a few months before, when she'd broken up with Shane—though she hadn't been given the same sort of grief as I expected to get. One, because she hadn't been married, and two, because they seemed to expect her to be unreliable.

Cautiously I opened the living room door. They were clustered on the couch watching
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
? and pouring scorn on the candidates.

“Any idiot knows the answer to that,” Helen threw at the screen.

“What is it then?” Anna asked.

“I don't know. But I don't HAVE to know. I'm not about to lose ninety-three thousand pounds. Oh, go on, then, phone your friend, for all the good it'll do, if he's as stupid as you—”