Make Yourself at Home Page 15

  Marianne wanted to remind him that he used to be used to her. He used to be able to tell her apart. To know what set her apart from everybody else. Which was pretty much everything, she supposed. Maybe if she had been more like everybody else, he would have stayed.

  She bent down and peered at the twins. She was glad they were asleep. Babies often cried at the sight of her. She thought it might be something to do with her hair. The untamed amount of it.

  ‘People say they look like me,’ Brian said.

  Marianne thought they looked like miniature Winston Churchills. She nodded and said, ‘Yes, they do,’ which must have been the right thing to say because she could feel him swelling with pride. She straightened. ‘What age are they now?’

  ‘Three weeks,’ said Brian. ‘And five days,’ he added, unable to help himself.

  Marianne understood this part of him. The accountant part. She knew she should enquire about Helen. The mother. She imagined her waving them off at the front door, her peaches-and-cream complexion, cupping her hand around the babies’ tiny heads and kissing Brian on the corner of his mouth, which would already be twitching with the makings of a massive smile. An ‘I got everything I ever wanted and more’ smile. An ‘I broke my promise and got away with it’ smile.

  She wondered what they called each other. ‘Pet’, maybe. ‘Goodbye, pet,’ Helen might have said. ‘See you in a little bit, darling,’ Brian might have responded even though he was not a terms-of-endearment kind of a fellow. Except now he was, in Marianne’s head. He might have waved, a small self-satisfied wave that hinted at more where that came from when he got back with the babies, fast asleep. More terms of endearment. More affection. More love. Lots of love. Plenty to go around. Just not enough for Marianne.

  ‘So,’ said Brian, shifting from one foot to the other. ‘You got my telephone message?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t mind my calling you,’ he said, looking carefully at Marianne. ‘It’s just … I wanted to tell you myself, you know? About the babies. And you probably already knew about For Sale sign but … I know how much you loved that house.’

  ‘Not so much after the bank repossessed it, to be honest,’ said Marianne.

  Brian had the grace to flush.

  ‘I … heard about that, all right,’ he said in a small voice. ‘I’m sorry.’

  His pity stung like a swarm of wasps.

  ‘I wasn’t surprised that it sold so quickly,’ he said then.

  ‘Sold?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry. I thought you … I saw it online.’

  Marianne cleared her throat. ‘Right. Well, I won’t keep you. I’m sure you’re … busy. You and Helen. How is she?’ It sounded like she was speaking through gritted teeth. Were her teeth gritted? She wasn’t even sure what that meant. Or how to achieve it. Either way, she didn’t think they were gritted. Although her jaw ached, she noticed. As if she had been clenching it.

  ‘Oh, Helen’s fine. A little tired, of course,’ said Brian, doing that small laugh that people do when they roll out tried-and-trusted lines.

  ‘Of course,’ said Marianne, who almost always felt exhausted these days and that was while getting a full eight hours’ sleep a night with no infant twins or their fontanelles to worry about.

  ‘And she’s finding the breastfeeding a little tricky,’ confided Brian. ‘But not to worry, we’ll get there in the end.’

  ‘I’m not sure what your role is in the whole breastfeeding business,’ said Rita, appearing beside Marianne like a ship out of the mist.

  Brian reddened. ‘Oh, you know, a bit of moral support.’

  ‘Good to see you’ve finally learned how to give some,’ said Rita, reaching up in an effort to get her arm around Marianne’s neck.

  ‘Well, it was … nice to see you,’ said Marianne in a rush. She was in an awkward position now, having to bend and twist at the waist to accommodate Rita’s arm.

  ‘Oh … right … yes, I’ll … see you soon.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Marianne said, alarmed.

  ‘No, I just meant … you know … goodbye.’

  ‘Oh. Yes,’ said Marianne. ‘Goodbye.’

  It sounded maudlin, the word. Drenched in pathos. Especially since the others stepped forward and said it too. ‘Goodbye.’

  Brian turned briefly. He lifted his hand when he saw the solemn line of them, staring after him. Waved it.

  Goodbye.

  Chapter 19

  ‘I must say, Marianne, I’m the tiniest bit confused. A lovely filly like yourself teaming up with that oaf.’ Freddy shook his head.

  ‘Filly!’ snorted Bartholomew. ‘Who do you think you are? Rupert Campbell Black?’

  They were in the Jeep and Marianne was driving everybody back to their various houses. She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles whitened. ‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about it?’ she said.

  She glanced in the rear-view mirror and caught Patrick’s eye, who nodded briefly.

  ‘Of course, my dear girl, as you wish,’ said Bartholomew.

  ‘What are we not supposed to be talking about?’ piped up Ethel from the back.

  ‘Marnie’s ex,’ said Rita. ‘The dick.’

  ‘That’s not helping,’ said Marianne.

  She yanked at her indicator all of a sudden and scorched round a corner, left instead of right, fast enough for the wheels to protest against the road surface.

  Everybody jerked.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Marianne, accelerating up the road.

  ‘Why are we going this way?’ Freddy wanted to know.

  ‘Take it easy, dear,’ called out Ethel. ‘The undertaker may have his eye on me but I’m not ready to be laid out just yet.’ She chuckled at her little joke.

  ‘Several fortunetellers have told me I would die young,’ said Bartholomew, with a tragic air.

  ‘Well, they got that wrong, clearly,’ said Freddy, smirking.

  ‘But where are we going?’ Bartholomew went on, ignoring Freddy.

  ‘I’m certain Marianne has it all in hand,’ Ethel piped up.

  Marianne, who did not share Ethel’s certainty, said nothing.

  She drove on, to Carling Road.

  She saw it immediately. A ‘Sold’ sign covering the ‘For Sale’ on the board.

  She slowed down.

  Then stopped.

  She looked at the house. She hadn’t realised until now that she still thought of it as her home. She had harboured some vague idea, tucked in a bottom drawer at the back of her mind, that she would return here someday and everything would get back to the way it used to be. That she would get back to the way she used to be.

  As someone who was rarely given to unsubstantiated optimism, Marianne realised this idea – this hope – was out of character.

  Also foolish.

  Marianne tried not to think about strangers in her house, poking around, turning their noses up. Or even loving it as she had. She drove on. Up the road. Away from the house. She concentrated on the road. On her hands wrapped around the steering wheel. The glint of sunshine on the band of her wedding ring. Technically, she was still married, she had reasoned when she noticed that she hadn’t taken it off. Not when Brian told her he was leaving. Not when he left. Not when he never came back.

  She jammed on the brakes and wrenched the handbrake up. Everyone was jerked forward, then back.

  ‘Are you all right, Marnie?’ asked Rita in the kind of cautious voice one might use on an unpredictable animal. Marianne grabbed the ring on her finger and pulled. She twisted it this way, then that, yanked again. It wouldn’t budge. It was stuck. As stuck as she was.

  More infuriating was the fact that it was Brian who had wanted to get married. He said it would make the management of their affairs easier, in the event of one of their deaths. He also spoke about the burden of taxation being easier to bear, as a married couple. Marianne was sure he must have said other – nicer – things but she couldn’t for the life of her remember any of them
now.

  They got married in the registry office on Lombard Street. Marianne invited Rita, only because Brian might have thought it strange if she hadn’t. After all, he had his sister, Linda, as his guest, and his cousin Bernard as his best man. Marianne said she didn’t want a bridesmaid – who would she have asked if she did? – but she supposed it would look strange if she had nobody.

  Rita wore a white, floor-length dress. Marianne wore a navy trouser suit with a cream blouse and a pair of Nike runners, new ones, to facilitate the walk from their house to the registry office. Afterwards, Bernard returned to the printing press where he worked and Marianne and Brian took Rita and Linda to dinner in a restaurant in Drumcondra, and after that Linda returned to Guernsey, Rita returned to Ancaire, and Marianne and Brian returned home to Carling Road where they watched a nature programme – a family of polar bears in the Arctic – before going to bed. They read their books as they always did – Tales of the Unexpected for Brian and Watership Down for Marianne – before they settled themselves on their respective sides of the bed and fell asleep. As far as Marianne remembered, they didn’t have sex, which suited her just fine. She had only ever slept with Brian and while she didn’t mind sex, she would much rather read. She had never told Brian that. She knew enough to know that some men might take such a preference personally.

  She had assumed Brian felt the same way, since he rarely initiated sex and often said, ‘No thank you,’ when she wondered if he wanted to.

  Now she knew that he did want to have sex. Just not with her.

  That stung more than she would have imagined.

  Sometimes, she imagined them in bed, Brian and Helen. In her imaginings, they were noisy and sweary and sweaty. Helen wore sexy things, like … Marianne wasn’t sure … something lacy and black. Suspenders maybe. High heels. Or those boots that go up to your thighs.

  She couldn’t imagine Brian in anything other than his boxer shorts, his erection enormous in her imaginings, making a tent of the material at the front. He called Helen ‘baby’ when he came. ‘Oh yeah, baby, oh, that’s so good, baby, don’t stop, baby.’ That kind of thing. Which seemed most unlikely. Brian had never called Marianne anything other than her full name. Why would he call Helen baby? Infantilise her in that way? She was sure he didn’t. So why did he do it when she imagined him having sex with Helen?

  And why on earth was she imagining such a thing in the first place?

  Marianne tugged harder at the ring.

  ‘You need a bit of butter, dear,’ said Ethel, leaning forward and patting Marianne’s shoulder with one of her long, thin hands.

  ‘I don’t have butter.’ Marianne’s breath was laboured with exertion.

  ‘Stop,’ said Rita. ‘You’ll pull the finger off yourself.’

  Marianne’s finger was an alarming purple colour now, the knuckle swollen with all the pulling and reefing. Coming up the road behind her, a man in a sharp suit and a Lexus, speaking into a phone. Marianne closed her eyes and heaved with all her might and, bit by bit, the ring relented and she was finally able to persuade it off her finger. She held it aloft and everybody cheered, and there was a moment when Marianne considered doing the same. Instead, she rolled down her window.

  ‘Wait,’ said Rita. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m throwing it away,’ said Marianne. ‘I should have done it ages ago.’

  ‘Give it to me,’ said Rita, holding out her hand. ‘I’ll sell it on eBay and give the money to Focus Ireland, okay?’

  Marianne sighed. She handed her wedding ring to her mother and turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened.

  ‘Move it, will you?’ the driver in the Lexus behind shouted out of his window at Marianne. ‘Bloody women drivers.’

  Rita undid her seat belt.

  ‘Please don’t,’ said Marianne as her mother turned round and kneeled on her seat.

  ‘I’ll just be a tick,’ said Rita. She rolled down her window, leaned out until she was sure she had the driver’s full attention. Then she extended her arm in his direction, unfurling her middle finger from the circle of her hand as she did. The man’s face registered surprise followed quickly by a sort of frustrated fury. He bore down on his horn. Rita beamed at him before arranging herself back inside the Jeep, rolling up the window, putting her seat belt on. She patted the steering wheel. ‘Who’s a lovely Jeep then?’ she said, and nodded at Marianne. ‘Now try.’

  When Marianne turned the key in the ignition, the engine coughed, then roared.

  She drove away.

  ‘At least you’re not an alcoholic,’ offered Freddy, ‘so you can get drunk if you want to without worrying.’

  ‘Yes, but if she wants to get drunk, surely that’s a sign that she could be an alcoholic,’ said Bartholomew peevishly.

  ‘Wanting to get drunk after meeting your ex hardly makes you an alcoholic,’ snapped Freddy, using the fallen hem of his corduroy jacket to wipe the lenses of his glasses. ‘That just makes you a common-or-garden Irish person.’

  ‘I don’t want to get drunk,’ said Marianne.

  ‘What do you want, dear?’ asked Ethel, gently.

  ‘I … I don’t know,’ said Marianne. She wished her response didn’t sound so feeble. She wished she was the type of person who did get rip-roaring drunk. Who shouted and railed. Someone who could make herself heard.

  But that was not her way.

  Chapter 20

  In fact, Marianne did know what she wanted to do. She wanted to steal something. She managed not to by sequestering herself upstairs in Rita’s draughty studio at the gable end of the house, where she sat on the high stool by the windows and watched the tide flooding and draining far below. The movement of the water, rising and falling, swelling and receding seemed relentless. Like life. It just kept going. It wouldn’t let her be.

  At dinner she endured Aunt Pearl, who was frosty and took more pleasure than usual in dousing the protest in cold, stagnant water.

  ‘So has the decision to evict Shirley been withdrawn? No? Did the landlord respond in any way? I didn’t think so. And that councillor you’ve been flirting with, Rita? He was a no-show? Well, I did tell you not to bother. I hope none of the neighbours complained about noise pollution. So unladylike, screeching in public.’

  Rita put down her knife and fork and smiled. ‘Ah, Pearl, if I’d known how much you were going to miss us, I would have dragged you along.’ She put her chubby warm hand on Pearl’s icy skin-and-bone one.

  Pearl yanked her hand away. ‘I really can’t imagine how you arrived at such a conclusion, Rita,’ she said in a strained voice while two bright pink circles bloomed in her cheeks.

  After dinner, Marianne further distracted herself by going to bed and reading. She was halfway through Jane Eyre now. George insisted on getting on the bed and resting his head in the crook of her elbow, which made turning the pages awkward. She read until she was too tired to read, then turned off the light and tried to sleep. When she couldn’t, she sat up, turned the light back on and read again. When she woke up, it was morning, her light was on and the book had fallen across George’s face so that all she could see was the damp tip of his nose at the base of the spine. She lifted the book. The skin on her finger was indented with the shape of her wedding ring. Soft and pulpy too, with a deathly pallor as if the blood supply had been cut off years ago.

  She wanted to steal something. Something small and inconsequential. She would be careful this time. Professional. She would make sure she had eaten something light but nutritious beforehand. Eggs. She would eat eggs for lunch and then she would steal something.

  Some part of her knew that this was not a sensible plan. That rational people did not come up with such schemes as solutions to whatever hurdles they might be facing.

  And anyway, she wasn’t facing any hurdles. Maybe that was the problem. Her hurdles were behind her, lying where they had fallen. Her marriage, her job, her home. She had knocked them over, each of them in turn.

  Seeing Brian
wheeling his babies with such pride and love brought all of Marianne’s failures into sharp focus. Even when she closed her eyes, she saw them still. There was no getting away from them.

  Her plan – however misguided – distracted her. It got her out of bed and dressed. It allowed her to run the gauntlet of the moss-slick steps to the beach, throw a stone for George. And another one. And another.

  It propelled her into the Jeep, got her to Skerries, to Balbriggan, to Rush, to Swords, back to Ancaire, where she remembered who took what type of tea and managed to divide Rita’s butter shortbread into twelve identical portions.

  Afterwards the Get-Well-Sooners were going, en masse, to Happy Hair, where Shirley and Hugh would bestow a purple rinse on Ethel, see to Bartholomew’s hot-towel shave, and barely trim the ends of Freddy’s hair. Rita, her jade-green turban wound tight around her head, said she had only just washed her hair that morning but would come along anyway, if only as an independent observer.

  Marianne pulled up on the main street in Rush and the Get-Well-Sooners exploded from the Jeep like shrapnel.

  ‘Miss you already, Marnie,’ said Bartholomew, blowing a kiss at her.

  ‘You sure you won’t change your mind and come with us?’ said Freddy. ‘Hugh could easily—’

  ‘Hugh’s good but he’s no miracle worker,’ said Shirley, picking up a strand of Marianne’s hair. ‘No offence,’ she said, grinning at Marianne.

  Rita leaned in through the Jeep window, looked at Marianne. ‘You okay, Marnie?’

  Marianne didn’t bother correcting her. She nodded. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  Eventually they left, linking arms as they walked away, so that they looked like a scene from the director’s cut edition of The Wizard of Oz.

  Marianne thought about stealing.

  In a last-ditch effort to dissuade herself, she pictured Judge Henderson’s face, peering at her from her elevated bench at the top of the courtroom. Marianne remembered the sharp flash of her blue eyes, the stiff helmet of wig perched on top of her head and the way she took Marianne in at a glance, summed her up.