The Better Half Page 14

  Accident and Emergency was like Armageddon. I’d have been better off dying of a heart attack. It was bedlam. If you weren’t traumatized going in, you would be coming out. The marble-effect lino, orange plastic chairs and strip lighting made everyone look like jaundiced insects. It was like being on the set of Shameless. The whole place was like an ad for ‘Say No to Drugs’.

  ‘What’s da story?’ a man asked, as he sat down beside me, a bloodied bandage around his head.

  My nose had stopped bleeding. Ciara had been right. The triage nurse said it was a burst blood vessel. But my heart felt as if a vice had tightened it. I was given a preliminary ECG. I was in no immediate danger of croaking it, which was good news. But I’d been put on the ‘urgent’ list. This meant, according to the nurse, that I’d only be waiting a couple of hours to be seen by a doctor. God knew how long those designated ‘minor’ would have to hang around.

  The nurse asked me if I’d consumed alcohol or taken any cocaine. I knew why she was cross. I was clogging up the unit because of my stupid behaviour. And she was right. I could feel shame boiling inside me. But she had far too much attitude for someone in a caring profession.

  ‘Are yis interested in buying any gear, love?’ Bandage Man was asking me. ‘Or any yokes?’

  ‘No – no, thanks,’ I said. I’d done enough drugs for one evening.

  He didn’t seem to hear me. He looked beyond me with the spaced-out gaze of the hardened drug user. Not that, under the circumstances, I was one to be throwing stones. ‘Five yokes for twenty squids,’ he said, fiddling with his gold sovereign ring and sniffing. His nails were bitten back to the quick.

  ‘Sorry, no,’ I said again.

  ‘Ah – g’wan, love, they’re A1,’ he said.

  ‘No, thanks.’ Did I look like a user to a professional such as him?

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘scabby bitch.’

  A young fella – a complete head-the-ball with a baseball cap turned backwards – kept shouting down the phone as if there was nobody else in the room. ‘I’ll fuckin’ swing for ya if you lay a finger on her, d’ye hear me, roight?’

  Behind me somebody yelled, ‘I’ve got rights. This is fuckin’ ridiculous. I’ve been waiting for fuckin’ hours. What’s the story here?’

  Maybe this was what hell looked like. My eyes roamed around the waiting room. People high on drugs and alcohol careering around in sportswear that had never seen any sporting action, their knuckles, necks and ears weighed down with cheap gold jewellery, tormenting the overburdened staff.

  My heart was calming down a bit.

  There was a scuffle. The man shouting about his rights was being ejected by two weary security guards. All in a night’s work, their expressions seemed to say.

  ‘Bastards the whole lot of yez,’ he bellowed, digging his heels into the floor. ‘Fuckin’ bastards.’

  The woman on my right – a huge mound packaged inside a flimsy polka-dot blouse – was cramming Taytos into her mouth with salt-encrusted fingers. Was she ultra-confident or the reverse, I wondered.

  Then an old one in a pink and black tracksuit with sores all around her mouth schlepped up to me. ‘Carly’s me name,’ she said, swinging her arse down next to me and leaning in on top of me – her breath stank of fags and booze. ‘And friendship’s me game,’ she said, cackling.

  I felt sorry for her but I just couldn’t handle her, so when she turned to the drug dealer on the other side I moved seats. There was nobody I could ring, I thought, my eyes moist.

  ‘Anita Butler,’ said a voice.

  I stared at its owner. He was short with sloping shoulders.

  ‘Anita,’ he repeated. I nodded.

  ‘I thought so,’ he said, squinting at me in a way I remembered. It made him look a bit slow. Actually, he was incredibly clever.

  I stared at him slack-jawed. ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ I said, shaking his hand. It felt squishy and slightly clammy.

  We had called him Animal, perhaps after the mad drummer in The Muppet Show. He had been called that before my time, the nickname following him down the years. Our naming conventions often meant that we nicknamed somebody their polar opposite. We’d had a teacher with poker-straight hair called ‘Curly’. Animal’s real name was Mr Stack.

  He was wearing a shapeless tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, much as I remembered. It might have been the same jacket. Its shoulders were decorated with a sea of dandruff. He had a long nose with slit-like nostrils. An image of him walking across the schoolyard behind the grey metal fences, eating biscuits furtively – so he wouldn’t have to share them – flashed into my mind. ‘Give us a biscuit, sir,’ we used to shout at him.

  His skin was still pockmarked and the thick bottle glasses that made his eyes look abnormally big were smudged. He needed a haircut. And he still wore the big leather ‘Made in Ireland’ – Déanta in Éirinn– shoes.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if it was you there at first, faith,’ he said, peering at me myopically.

  ‘Have the years been so unkind?’ I trilled, and instantly regretted it.

  He didn’t reply, just kept looking at me closely as if I was an alien fallen to earth.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Erra sure grand,’ he said, in his thick Kerry accent. Suddenly I was struck by a thought that made me feel damp with embarrassment. He would have registered the change in my speech. But there was no way I could revert to the broad Dub accent of my youth without sounding even more of a fraud.

  ‘In here with a suspected broken arm,’ he said. It was tied up in a tea-towel. ‘And how are you yourself?’

  ‘I’m terrible,’ I wanted to howl. ‘I feel so ashamed and so low and so hollowed out. I’ve hit rock bottom.’ I had no armour left but, like General Custer, I made one last stand. I smiled at him, baring my expensively purchased boomtime teeth. ‘I’m great, thanks,’ I said, forcing my voice into a pleasant perkiness.

  ‘’Tis cat in here,’ he said, looking around.

  He was an out-and-out culchie. That I remembered. We used to take the holy piss out of him. And he used to give it right back to us. ‘I’d never trust a Dub to watch my spuds boil,’ he’d say, so that we’d howl with laughter. With his Evening Press and the Kerry football jersey he’d wear under the tweed jacket. ‘An peil’, he called the football. He was always bursting into Irish. We teased him because we were mad about him. He was an inspirational man. A brilliant teacher. There had been nobody to touch him at St Fachtna’s. He had believed in us. He was our own Mr Chips.

  ‘What did you do with yourself?’ he asked.

  I stared at him dumbly. Then: ‘After school?’

  He nodded.

  My stomach churned. The pause grew and stretched ahead of me accusingly. I was assailed by memories that I had done a good job of screening. ‘Well,’ I said, in a peppy little voice, wilfully misunderstanding him, ‘I got married and had two lovely children. Dylan is nearly twenty-two, he’s a stockbroker. Ella is nineteen, and she’s just finished first law.’ I gave him a brilliant purposeful smile. ‘She’s gone to America for the summer on a sort of a scholarship to do with prisoners’ rights. My husband Frank is a property developer.’ His eyes were completely unreadable. ‘You might have read about him?’ I said, instantly conscious that I’d referred to my husband and therefore to his success.

  I did this a lot. It was my way of gaining recognition. I’d feel a pulse of pride when I saw the look in their eyes that seemed to say, ‘Ah, now we’re interested’. It was my only way of identifying myself in a public sense – my calling card. It was downright pathetic.

  Animal was ominously silent.

  ‘Frank Lawlor, the property developer?’ I tried again, slightly indignant that he might not know of him.

  He sort of nodded. I wasn’t entirely sure. The big fishy eyes were still train
ed on me. He lacked social skills. He taught maths. Figures were his thing.

  ‘What did you do yourself, though?’ he said, squinting.

  I looked down at his scuffed shoes. ‘Don’t ask me this,’ I wanted to shout, heat creeping into my cheeks. In the world I moved in women didn’t get asked this question. We were mothers and wives, end of story, some of us decorative, some of us not, but we didn’t have to account for ourselves.

  ‘I worked for a while in Brown Thomas,’ I said, reddening. I had been on a makeup counter, which was considered the business back then. I used to sashay up Grafton Street in my nice clothes thinking I was the cat’s pyjamas. ‘And I worked as a hostess in a nightclub on Leeson Street,’ I added, my tummy tightening. ‘Those were the days,’ I burbled, with a laugh.

  Silence.

  ‘You never did anything with your maths so?’

  ‘No,’ I said, glancing down at my hands. ‘Leave me alone,’ I wanted to say. ‘Just leave me alone.’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘I thought we’d hear about you,’ he said. ‘I felt certain that we’d have news of you. About the things you’d gone on to do,’ he said, sticking his tongue out between his teeth.

  Then, when I’d thought he could twist the knife no further, he said it. The blood in my veins turned to lead. ‘You had an exceptional gift for maths.’

  Oh, good Jesus. I was winded. I’d limped into the hospital with my heart aching from a faithless husband, the humiliation of a suspected drug overdose, the knowledge that I had insulted my friends – and now this. It was like being hit over the head with a shovel.

  ‘My mother got cancer just after the Leaving,’ I said.

  ‘I heard that all right,’ he said, his eyes still trained on me. ‘I was sorry,’ he added.

  A male nurse came out through a door labelled ‘Triage’. ‘Sean Stack,’ he called.

  ‘Looks like your ship has come in,’ I said jokily.

  ‘’Twas a pleasure to meet you, Anita. Take care of yourself,’ he said. ‘You’ve changed a lot, girleen.’ He shuffled off, trailing the unmistakable whiff of disappointment.

  The hospital let me go about six hours later. Walking outside, I blinked at the grey morning air. They had made me run on a machine and given me beta-blockers to slow down my pulse. The little arrhythmic seizures had tailed off. As an official waste of hospital resources, I was deeply ashamed of myself. My mouth was sandpaper dry. My head pounded from a hangover. I was jittery and fearful of the impending showdown with Frank.

  He was waiting for me when I got home. I heard him hawking before I saw him. I paused outside the door before entering the room to see him sitting on the floor. He was slumped against the base of the circular 1970s cream leather sofa. The bedroom furniture had been made by a fancy design team. Ciara, Maeve and I had flown to Italy armed with our credit cards – the unholy trinity of consumerism – whipping each other into an orgy of competitive buying, like junkies let loose over a mound of white powder.

  Frank’s shoulders were dipped. Even from where I stood I could see that his eyes were puffy and sleep-deprived. I caught sight of my reflection in the two-tone 1960s mirror – a ‘find’ that I had been directed to by the man who had overseen much of my buying for the house. When I looked at it now I thought it was ugly – if not as ugly as me. I looked like someone who had fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. It was not a good look when you were trying to persuade your faithless husband to stay with you.

  The rain lashed against the window panes. The pasty grey light infiltrated our bedroom, dappling the floor in sombre patches. Frank’s meaty arms were folded across his squat body as if to protect himself. He was dressed in trousers and an open-necked shirt, brown suede loafers on his feet. In our early years he had been very keen on shirts and ties and waistcoats until I’d explained the rules of casual dressing to him.

  He knew I was standing there. My pulse began to gallop again. He broke the silence first, his head turned away. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Hospital,’ I said shortly, feeling my heart accelerate.

  He accepted my explanation without comment. There was no ‘Look at the state of you’, which said a lot. ‘We’ll need an ark if this keeps going,’ he remarked, staring out the curved bay windows.

  He was trying to talk about the weather. He and his culchie family never shut up about it, I thought, angry tears filming my eyes. ‘Why, Frank?’ I demanded. My voice had a rasping quality to it.

  He looked at me briefly, then flicked his eyes away.

  ‘Why??’ I demanded, stepping further into the room. My voice rose an octave. ‘Is it because I’m losing my looks, because I’m a depreciating fucking asset like all your other interests?’

  Still he said nothing.

  ‘Tell me, you fucker! Tell me!’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ he said, his eyes directed anywhere but on me. ‘It just sort of happened.’

  I was shaking. ‘Why did you do it? Was it the excitement, the freshness … the newness of her or what?’ I was shouting now.

  He ran his hand across his face. ‘Christ, I don’t know, Anita,’ he said.

  ‘It just sort of happened,’ I parroted back to him. Then: ‘You gave her a bracelet just like mine!’ I screamed. ‘My Jo Malone perfume!’

  For the first time his eyes swivelled to meet mine.

  ‘I met her when I was at Will’s clinic. I sat next to her on the day of your fiftieth. She told me about her boyfriend and how he’d been finished with his wife for years. How they were just going through the motions,’ I said. ‘Then I worked out she was talking about us.’

  ‘Anita … I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry doesn’t cut it, fucker. Did you go out trawling bars and nightclubs looking for someone?’ I asked, jabbing my finger in the air.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. It was slightly broken-looking, like a boxer’s, but it was a nose I had loved. ‘I met her through work,’ he said quietly, lowering his head. ‘She’s an estate agent.’

  ‘How perfect,’ I said, with a hard, bitter laugh that nearly choked me. ‘She’s an estate agent,’ I repeated. I was pacing up and down the room now, ranting like a mad woman. ‘I gave up everything to be your wife,’ I cried. ‘I wanted to be a teacher.’

  His hand was half covering his face. ‘You were working in Brown Thomas when I met you,’ he said.

  ‘I could have gone to college,’ I screamed. ‘I met my old teacher last night and he said I had an exceptional gift for maths. I could have gone to Trinity College, Frank.’

  ‘Nobody stopped you, Anita,’ he said.

  That wasn’t true. He had bloody stopped me. I had been undermined by his success. He had used up all the oxygen in our marriage for achievement. Frank’s career had always come first. Yet even as I laid the entire blame at his doorstep, I felt creeping doubt. ‘Fuck you!’ I shrieked. ‘I had lots going for me,’ I said then, my chest heaving.

  ‘Nobody doubts that,’ Frank said.

  ‘Nobody doubts that. Nobody doubts that.’ I mimicked his voice. ‘The whole world doubts it.’

  I was crying now, walking around in manic circles. ‘I’m forty-five years of age. What am I supposed to do? I have nothing of my own.’

  ‘I’ll look after you.’

  ‘I’m not a child, Frank.’

  He said nothing.

  Tears rained down my face. ‘My identity,’ I spat, my chest heaving, ‘has been centred on being a mum and a wife. What am I supposed to do now? Am I supposed to just find myself a new identity?’

  It was then that my eye was caught by the bags. They were standing at the bottom of the grey chaise-longue. The bottom of my stomach fell away. Feverishly I changed tack and began to grope for the right words that would make him stay. At that second I knew I would be prepared to live with the humiliation, to shed my dignity – I would be prepared to eat shi
t – if he wouldn’t leave me.

  ‘We can get past this,’ I said, trying to make him look at me. ‘I love you, Frank. I’m your wife.’ My voice was pleading now. ‘Don’t go.’ The tears were cascading. He was deliberately not looking at me.

  ‘Anita,’ he said, putting a hand over his eyes.

  I put my bunched-up fist to my mouth. ‘You wanted her to have an abortion. I saw it in the note.’

  His jaw was clenched.

  ‘You wanted her to have an abortion, which means you didn’t want to have a family with her.’

  ‘She doesn’t believe in abortion,’ he said.

  ‘We can go for couples counselling,’ I said, although even in my panic I knew that, with Frank, that was about as likely as a pig flying past the window.

  He stood up so that we faced each other. I was desperate now. ‘Do you remember the day we got married, Frank? How happy we were? Walking down the aisle after we were married, Mr and Mrs Lawlor … It was such a beautiful day even though it was November. The sun was shining but there was a bit of wind. The confetti blew everywhere.’

  His eyes looked moist. ‘Don’t, Anita,’ he said softly.

  I was babbling now, like a drowning woman fighting to keep her head above the water. ‘You helped me with my veil when we stepped outside. It blew in my face. Do you remember that, Frank? It was like we were in our own little bubble we were so happy.’

  We’d driven off in his car. Just the two of us, the cans dragging along the ground, the ‘Just Married’ sign organized by DJ, who’d been the best man. People on the street and in other cars had waved at us. I couldn’t remember what we’d said to each other but I remembered that it had felt as if we were the only two people in the world.

  ‘She’s pregnant, Anita,’ he said. His voice was very quiet now, almost inaudible. ‘She said she was on the pill but she’s pregnant …’ His voice petered out. His eyes were wet. He lifted his shoulders as if galvanizing himself. Then he walked to the dresser, pausing mid-stride. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his back to me.

  I watched him propel himself forward again. His fingers curled around the car keys. My face was as wet as the windows outside. My voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Don’t go, Frank. Don’t go.’