Someone Like You (18 page)

‘Try them on,’ Emma said mechanically, the way she’d done for years when they’d shopped as teenagers. Her role had been to hold the handbags and supply different sizes while Kirsten enraged the changing-room queue by spending at least half an hour in the cubicle, discarding things like Imelda Marcos on a shoe-buying frenzy.

‘Yes, I think I will try them. But I’ll just get a couple of other things. No point stripping off for two tops and a pair of trousers.’

As Kirsten scanned the rails with the narrowed eyes of an expert, Emma thought about their mother. She wished she could be like Kirsten and simply not confront problems, or just put them out of her mind. But she couldn’t. Something was wrong with AnneMarie, she knew it. And she hoped — no, she prayed - it wasn’t senile dementia.

She’d read snippets about it, articles she’d half-scanned in women’s magazines in between fashion features and the problem pages. She’d never exactly been interested, but that curious desire to read about other people’s suffering, if only to thank your lucky stars it wasn’t happening to you, had meant she’d absorbed some information about the disease. A slow, insidious intruder, it crept into people’s minds and took over, making its presence known gradually with moments of forgetfulness, before leading up to …

what, exactly? Emma wasn’t sure. Did people die from it?

Waiting outside the cubicle for Kirsten, she tried to put the whole thing out of her mind. Kirsten was right.. Their mother was too young … wasn’t she?

‘Great Aunt Petra isn’t coming, is she?’ groaned Kirsten, looking at Emma’s rough table plan for their mother’s birthday dinner.

‘Of course she is,’ Emma said, emerging from basting the goose again, her face puce with heat and exertion.

‘She’s Dad’s only living aunt and he’d go mental if she wasn’t invited.’

‘She’s an unhinged bitch and everybody hates her,’ protested Kirsten. ‘If Dad wants to invite her to their bloody house, that’s his business. I don’t know why the rest of us have to put up with her.’

‘Yeah,’ snapped Emma, fed up with the lack of catering help Kirsten had provided since she’d arrived an hour previously with her hair newly blow-dried and no obvious intention of doing anything useful. ‘And who’d have to put up with the full-scale row there’d be if she wasn’t here?

Me, that’s who. I’d never hear the end of it.’

‘Emma, would you listen to yourself? You’re an adult, this is your house and you can invite who you bloody want to. Let Dad throw a tantrum if he wants. Ignore him. I do.’ Kirsten ran a lilac fingernail down the list. ‘Monica and Timmy Maguire! Ugh, he’ll get poor Patrick in a corner and ask him what he should do with his shares, as usual.

I told Patrick to ask for a fee next time.’

‘You’re bloody great at telling people what to do,’ hissed Emma, finally having had enough. She was hot, sweaty, tired and fed up with Kirsten. ‘Did you come here to help or to simply point out what an inadequate human being I am?’

Kirsten refused to be riled. ‘Keep your hair on, Sis,’ she answered. ‘You’re only pissed off because you know I’m right. If you don’t stand up to Dad some day, you may as well move back home - because you’re totally under his thumb as it is.’

Emma felt her anger deflate like a pricked balloon. Her eyes filled with tears. The goose wasn’t half-cooked, the guests were rolling up in an hour and Pete, who’d promised to be home early, was stuck with a client in Maynooth and wouldn’t be back until at least seven.

‘It’s easy for you,’ she told Kirsten, feeling hot, angry tears flooding down her face. ‘You’ve always been their pet.

You could tell Dad to fuck off and he’d smile indulgently at you. But he hates me; I can never do anything right for him. All I want is some respect - it’s not too much to ask, is it?’ She tried to rub away the tears but they kept coming.

If fury had no effect on Kirsten, neither did weeping, which was why she so successfully dealt with her father’s machinations.

‘He doesn’t hate you, Sis,’ she said calmly, ignoring Emma’s tears. ‘He’s a bully and you’ve let yourself be his own personal punchbag. I can’t help you and neither can Pete. You’re on your own. Jesus, Emma, if you can run that bloody office, then you can certainly deal with Dad, can’t you? Now, what do you want me to do next? You better go upstairs and make yourself presentable or Petra the Gorgon will have a few choice insults to fling at you about how you’re letting yourself go now that you’re married.’

If the birthday dinner proved anything, it proved that their fears about their mother were unfounded. AnneMarie sailed into the house with her husband in tow, face wreathed in smiles and new earrings to be admired. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ she said coquettishly, pulling back a strand of long, pale gold hair, which flowed loosely around her shoulders. ‘They’re from your father.’ She kissed Kirsten happily.

‘Darling Kirsten, I don’t know what was wrong with me the other day, I found that lovely voucher you gave me for Christmas. I know it’s bad of me, but I completely forgot about it and now it’s out of date, but it was a lovely thought. I couldn’t see anything with those old glasses, but look-‘ she produced new glasses with snazzy gold frames - ‘I’ve got new ones and reading is no problem any more.

Hello, Emma love, there’s a nice smell coming from the kitchen. I hope it’s not goose; you know Auntie Petra says it gives her indigestion ever since we had it at her Roland’s christening back in 1957.’

Emma and Kirsten shared a conspiratorial grin. ‘All the more reason for cooking goose, eh?’ whispered Kirsten.

Emma nodded with relief. Her mother was perfectly all right. It was obvious there was nothing wrong with her mind. Nobody who could remember the ill-effects of a goose at a christening in 1957 could possibly have anything wrong with their brain.

Half an hour later, all the guests were there, wandering around the house and chatting. Emma was standing in the kitchen beside the dining-room door, hurriedly ironing the napkins she’d just removed from the drier. Her mother would have had a fit if she’d produced paper ones.

‘It’s a lovely dining room,’ she heard Monica Maguire say. ‘I like these pictures,’ she added, obviously admiring the Paul Klee prints Emma loved.

‘Well, it’s not to my taste,’ Emma overheard her father say gruffly. ‘Still, what can you say. I mean, myself and AnneMarie gave them the deposit money for it and we’d have liked to have helped them with decorating advice, but you know youngsters, ungrateful.’

Emma stood behind the door into the dining room and felt cold rage flood through her. How dare he tell people he’d given them the deposit money for the house! How dare he! That was their private life. And he hadn’t given it to them, anyway. She and Pete had insisted on treating it as a loan and were paying money into her parents’

account every month. But to casually tell a neighbour about it, as if she and Pete were kids or freeloaders who used and abused … That was terrible, awful. A fierce rage for her father burned in her peaceful soul. God she hated that man!

Leonie was not thrilled with herself. Despite spending many arm-aching hours painting, the kitchen did not look the way she wanted it to. The plan had been simple: inspired by endless television make-overs, Leonie had convinced herself that she too could turn a small cottage kitchen into an exotic Egyptian-inspired room with the aid of midnight blue paint, some artistic stencilling and a can of metallic spray paint. Unfortunately, what looked easy in half an hour on the telly with scores of helpers, expert carpenters, an interior designer and an entire TV crew ready to help out if necessary, wasn’t easy in real life. After three evenings and her entire Sunday spent knee-deep in old newspapers with the animals sulking in another room, the kitchen looked desperate. Two of the walls were a frighteningly dark midnight blue with silver stars supposedly reflecting the silver of the knobs she’d bought for the cupboards.

The cupboards themselves had been painted primrose to go with both the freshly painted woodwork and the other two walls, but instead of gliding on to the carefully prepared surfaces, the paint had dried in myriad globules so it looked as if the doors had developed smallpox.

Her idea of having stars on the ceiling had been lovely and very celestial, but midnight blue everywhere had made the room - small and, luckily, south-facing - a bit gloomy.

So she’d wearily repainted two walls. It took three coats of primrose to cover the blue.

Meanwhile, the stencilled border, which the stencil book she’d borrowed from the library described as ‘an Egyptian inspired motif of birds and animals’, resembled something inexpert four-year-olds might daub on their first day at school in between peeing in their seats and sobbing for their mummies.

‘It’s a bit ambitious, Leonie,’ her mother had remarked kindly when she arrived that afternoon with some flowers from her garden and home-made tea brack to celebrate the children’s return.

‘I like it better today,’ Claire said, finding a vase for the off-white roses and putting the kettle on to boil at the same time. ‘It was too dark when it was all blue.’

‘I know.’ Covered with paint and exhausted after forty eight hours of decorating, Leonie was shattered. Her black leggings were like a Rorschach blot of primrose and blue paint, and Danny’s old grey sweatshirt wasn’t much better.

Every inch of her hands was crusty with emulsion and she needed an hour in the bath at least.

‘What have you been up to all day, Mum?’ Leonie asked, reaching under the table to pet Penny’s silky ears. Penny, who’d been largely ignored during the painting, hummed in bliss.

‘I worked on Mrs Byrne’s daughter’s wedding dress for hours. The pair of them should be strung up. Every time I do something, she changes her mind and I have to rip it.

Mrs Byrne insists on hanging around while I sew and the cats keep winding themselves round her legs so she’s permanently covered with fluff. I’m going to run out of Sellotape getting cat fur off her dress.’ Leonie’s mother had been a seamstress and, on retirement, had started her own dressmaking business. She was very good, and her tiny Bray front room was permanently full of hopeful clients wanting a debs dress or wedding outfit knocked up for half-nothing.

Claire took out her cigarettes and lit up. ‘I stopped at five and came down here for a break. Will I make us some tea, or are you rushing?’

‘You stopped at five o’clock?’ Leonie shot up in her seat as the words sank in. ‘What time is it now? I’ve taken my watch off so it wouldn’t get covered with gloss and I thought it was only three at the latest.’

‘It’s half five.’

‘Oh, Mother of God, the kids are coming home in an hour,’ wailed Leonie. ‘I’ll never change and make it to the airport on time.’

‘Well, I did think you were being very relaxed about getting to the airport. Sure, what do you want to change for? Just go like that,’ said her mother sensibly.

‘I wanted to look lovely for them coming home,’ Leonie said, rooting around under newspapers for her keys. ‘I wanted the house to look lovely too …’

‘They’ll be so pleased to see you, they won’t mine a bit of paint. I’ll rustle up some supper for you all, shall I?’

Tired from the transatlantic flight, the trio emerged half an hour late behind a trolley jammed with plastic bags, rucksacks and bulging suitcases. Mel and Abby were fashionably pale, thanks to many teen magazine articles warning of skin cancer. Danny, on the other hand, was mahogany. All three wore new clothes which made Leonie instantly guilty: their father had obviously decided they were dressed like ragamuffins and had kitted them out from head to toe in new gear. She was a bad, spendthrift mother for frittering away money on a holiday when the kids needed new stuff. The knowledge that at least three quarters of her clothes came from second-hand shops remained firmly at the back of her mind.

Mothers were supposed to dress in desperate, castoff rags as long as their offspring had the newest designer clothes and whatever variety of trainers Nike were advertising twenty-four hours a day on MTV.

‘You’ll never guess,’ squealed Mel excitedly as soon as the new clothes had been admired and they were in the car, rattling along the motorway.

‘Yeah, Mel’s got herself a boyfriend,’ interrupted Danny.

‘Have not!’ shrieked Mel.

‘Yes you have,’ Danny said, sounding less like a nineteen-year-old and more like his fourteen-year-old twin sisters.

Well, more like Mel. Not Abby. Abby was so grown up she wasn’t fourteen - she was going on forty.

‘Haven’t! And that wasn’t what I was going to say!’

roared Mel.

‘Stop it,’ said Leonie, wishing they’d waited at least until they were a mile away from the airport before the inevitable row. Danny and Mel sparked off each other like pieces of flint. Every conversation between them turned into an argument. It was because they were so alike. Abby was thoughtful and grave, like her father. Her siblings were the complete opposite.

Mel’s favourite sentence when she’d been four was, ‘I want Danny’s …’ Danny’s dinner, Danny’s drink, Danny’s toys. If it was his, she wanted it. And he, at the wise old age of nine, had been just as bad. Mel’s favourite cuddly toy - without which she refused to go to sleep - had been hidden with Danny’s Action Man collection for three whole murderous, sleepless nights before Leonie found it when she was hoovering.

The current argument subsided purely because Danny decided to play with his new Discman and stuck his earphones in with a bored shrug that said, ‘Women, huh!’

Leonie shuddered to imagine what a Discman cost. Hundreds of dollars, no doubt. Ray must be making a mint.

‘Will I tell her?’ Abby whispered to Mel.

‘Yes.’ Mel was sulking now. She stared out of the window with her pointed little face in a sulky pout. The beauty of the family, Mel could even sulk prettily. With her father’s big dark eyes, delicately arched eyebrows, translucent skin and full lips, she looked like a teenage catwalk model trying to look moody for a photo shoot.

‘Tell me what?’ asked Leonie, fascinated and dying to hear every bit of their news.