The Better Half Page 15

  He was positioned by the door now. I held out my arms, pleading. He was moving beyond me. My heart began to accelerate again. I grabbed his sleeve and started to sob. ‘Jesus Christ, don’t do this to me, Frank.’ I tried to prise the keys from him, leaning in towards him, but he pulled away flinching. He lunged for his bags. Scooping them up, he ran out the door. I could hear his footsteps pounding down the stairs and dying away. The front door banged. A car door slammed. The engine roared into life. And then there was the sound of a car reversing out of the drive.

  Part II

  7

  Karen was sucking the life out of a fag. ‘So, how are you?’ she asked, setting down the iron so that a little nimbus cloud of steam puffed into the air.

  I rested my elbows on the kitchen table and nudged some crayons out of the way. I wasn’t sure how to answer her. I was alone, rattling around in my house with Crouton, our dog. I felt like a displaced person, a refugee. Even Crouton seemed depressed, lying around in his ‘I love Mutt Ugly’ sweatshirt, with his head resting on his paws.

  ‘I’m worried about Dylan,’ I said.

  Dylan had taken the news of Frank’s leaving very badly. He had refused to see his father and wouldn’t take his calls. Big surprise there. I believed that Frank and I loved our children equally – but there was Team Frank and Ella, Team Anita and Dylan. Roughly speaking, I shielded Dylan from Frank’s dis-appointment, and Frank gave Ella the validation she required.

  ‘It’ll take time,’ Karen said.

  ‘Does Ella know?’

  ‘No, thank God.’

  We had decided not to say anything to her while she was so far away. Dylan had agreed to maintain the pretence. Still, considering the amount of publicity, I was surprised no one else had mentioned it. When she had rung from the States it had seemed incredibly weird saying, ‘No, no real news,’ when she’d asked if anything was up.

  ‘And how are you?’ Karen was watching me out of the corner of her eye.

  How was I? I didn’t want to tell my sister how I felt split open. How I was gripped by the nothingness of my life. How I replayed the scene of Frank running down the stairs, his receding steps echoing in my head, over and over. How I burst into tears spontaneously, sometimes sobbing as if I was in physical pain. How I had shocked myself with some of my thoughts – thoughts that had ambushed me in the middle of the night. Thoughts about smashing my Range Rover into a concrete wall. The sort of black thoughts that I would never have thought myself capable of.

  Karen was wearing the usual face she wore for talking about Frank. She was in her element now that it was open season on him and she no longer had to make sly digs. She had a legitimate reason to hate his guts. She was dying for me to let rip on him. She had been good to me, though, far better than I deserved, disloyal cow that I had been. There were days when I saw no reason to get out of bed. When Karen had come over on her white charger, to find me mouldering in the sheets, she’d half coaxed, half bullied me to my feet.

  ‘Thanks, Karen.’ I had begun to cry as she’d handed me a glass of water and some painkillers.

  ‘For what?’ she’d asked. ‘I’m your sister.’ I had felt a fresh burst of shame for having sidelined her.

  ‘I’ll rip his head off,’ she had said. And it seemed that the sentiment had stemmed as much from her upset for me as from her dislike of Frank.

  Now I said, ‘I’m okay.’ I felt tired and limp all the time, even though I was doing nothing more strenuous than sitting on my backside staring into space – or staring into the bottom of a wine glass. I found myself waking with a fuzzy head and dry mouth. Splashing my face, I would resolve not to drink that day. But then as the hours wore on there seemed no compelling reason not to drink.

  My friends had mostly gone away for the summer to their second homes. As soon as the holidays rolled around and the children had done whatever exams they were doing, there was a mass exodus from south County Dublin as they left for the season.

  Ciara was stationed in West Cork, presumably battling it out in the rain, which was still of epic proportions although she’d made light of it. She had rung once to relate ‘news’, in a gay social voice, which let me know that she was still not over the things I’d said in the Shelbourne. They’d been body-boarding at Barley Cove where the waves were rough and amazing. Will had caught a lobster so she was making a fish soup with a recipe that Will’s sister had given her, which involved roasting the lobster shells.

  Frank and I had gone down there once. Will had spent a lot of his time visiting the butcher and the fishmonger on the pier and generally bellowing across the narrow street at some other chum down from Dublin on his holidays about ‘the wonderful fresh lobster’ he’d bought on the pier from a fisherman called Liam or Willy or Padjo.

  ‘Never again,’ Frank had said, on the drive back. ‘It’s no holiday if you’re stuck freezing your balls off, looking out at the mist. Even the feckin’ cows look depressed.’

  Frank actually resented the way Will and Ciara went to West Cork. He was deeply suspicious that it was yet another way of asserting their poshness. ‘It’s just plain stupid trudging through the rain for a walk and pretending you’re all happy campers when you could be off sunning your arse in a five-star abroad with waiter service.’

  Ciara had said nothing about me coming down. Despite the banter about the lobster and the waves and the hot buttered scones in Adele’s Tea Room, our conversation had been strained. I didn’t blame her. I had implied that her marriage was boring and as good as accused her of being a drug addict.

  All my friends knew now that Frank had bolted and was having a baby with somebody else. It was in this context that they had mostly forgiven me for my meltdown.

  Shannon had gone home with the kids to the States to see her parents, as she did each summer. She texted me a lot, encouraging me to keep going and move on. She’d even suggested that I come with her to America, which was lovely of her, but I suspected she was relieved when I turned her down.

  Maeve’s appetite for gory details of the split far outweighed any ire she might have felt. She had suggested that I talk to a lawyer and fast. ‘The word on the street, Anita, is that Frank has made a big mistake in trying to build those hotels, that he won’t get the planning and that he’s going to go under.’

  Clearly the big bash we’d thrown for his fiftieth had failed as a PR exercise.

  ‘You need to get a settlement sorted quickly. You need to be pragmatic.’

  Well, Maeve was pragmatic. Underneath the pretty sexy surface lay thinly disguised ruthlessness. She had decamped to Northern Italy where they had a villa. It was outside Portofino near the rock star’s place, a fact she tortured Ciara with. ‘Oh, yes, she’s just so lovely,’ she’d say of the rock star’s wife, and poor Ciara would go green.

  In fact, Maeve didn’t give much of a damn about them, I thought, although she said it was worth living near them to torment Ciara, who was hell-bent on penetrating their circle and was constantly finding ways to get closer to them.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine Maeve rehashing the whole sorry tale under the hot Italian sun. I could see her in my mind’s eye, her face pulled into a suitably sympathetic shape: ‘Poor Anita. God love her, you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.’ Maeve would use all those Irish ways of expressing sympathy at somebody’s failure while relishing the chance to have a good old gossip. To be fair to Maeve, she had invited me to Italy, which she needn’t have done. ‘Don’t be a stranger,’ was what she had said, and I felt she’d meant it. Maeve was kind, in her own flawed way, and in spite of her lacerating tongue.

  Maureen had gone to Marbella. Her villa was an enormous U-shaped palace with twelve bedrooms, but it was dwarfed by its gigantic neighbour, the ridiculously big villa of a Saudi prince. We had one near by, although not on that scale. It was in an Irish enclave, slightly characterless but with a pool and palm trees and a small staff of local people who came in each
day to water the grass, make omelettes and clean the house.

  Maureen had begged me to come out. At one point I had considered it. The news of our split – it had been reported in the social diary of one paper and in a tabloid on the front page, ‘Developer Frank Lawlor Splits from Wife’ – had travelled around our patch of Dublin, which gave me another reason for wanting to flee. But I couldn’t face Maureen’s excessive sympathy. She was ringing and texting me non-stop, encouraging me to talk about it. She was ruthless in her compassion. There was nowhere to hide from the headlamp beam of her fanatical, unrelenting sympathy.

  ‘I know better than anyone what you’ve been through,’ she’d said on the phone, so I decided there and then to stay put. I didn’t want to offer my story up for dissection over lunch at the Marbella Club, to put myself forward as an object of pity. And I just wasn’t up to faking happiness. You needed energy for that.

  So there I was at home. I phoned Frank a lot, often in the middle of the night, great storms of tears and curses raining down the phone at him.

  ‘Anita, you’re going to have to stop ringing me like this,’ Frank had said one night, so that I had paused mid-rant. He had faltered, then added, ‘Fiona is pregnant. She needs her sleep.’

  Frank was living with her in Milltown. She had an expensive apartment – I wondered if Frank had bought it for her – but its value had tumbled, according to Karen, who made it her business to know these things and who read the property pages avidly. Karen was cute as the bees. She was mortgage-free, thanks to living in our parents’ council flat. After Ma had died, Karen and her Darren had moved in with Da to look after him. They had talked about moving on but it had never happened. So now Karen was failing to keep the smile off her face as the chickens came home to roost for those caught up in the great gold rush that had been the Irish property boom. ‘To quote Bessie Burgess,’ she said one night, ‘yez are all rightly shanghaied now.’

  ‘Do you not feel any sympathy for people in trouble?’

  She had shrugged. ‘It’s a rich person’s recession. It’s the little people like me who’ll have to carry the can for the crap they’ve got the country in. Some people, like the bankers and – sorry to say, mentioning no names – some of the developers, are lucky we’re not hanging them in the street. In fairness to my Darren, he mightn’t exactly be Einstein but he did say unfettered capitalism would destroy the capitalist system in the end.’

  I had thought of what Frank had said about Darren after he’d listened to one of his political monologues: ‘Darren is a lipless pussy-whipped cunt who might get more workers’ rights if he ever got up off his hole and did some work.’

  Anyway, I had challenged Karen: ‘Wasn’t it Marx who said that, rather than Darren?’

  Karen had smirked. ‘There’s hope for you yet. I see signs of recovery when you’re getting that lippy. And you know your Marx. I wouldn’t have you down as a Marxist.’

  ‘Pots and kettles,’ I had shot back. ‘Not sure you’d make the best comrade either, with your annual holiday to Spain and your department-store job.’

  ‘I’m lukewarm on Communism,’ she’d served back at me – conversation with Karen was very often like a heated game of tennis, with balls banging across the net. ‘Russian women didn’t have it easy under Communism, queuing for bread and having to wear hickey clothes and crap eye shadow and having to stick crisps bags on fellas’ willies with elastics instead of johnnies because they were too poor to get proper ones.’

  Karen was inspecting me now. ‘You look a bit tired,’ she said.

  I gave a short bark of a laugh. ‘You think? I know I look awful,’ I said. There were pouches under my eyes. My cheeks were sunken, my makeup slapped anyhow onto my face. I looked ragged in a way I had never looked before. I had always been vain, twirling in front of mirrors making faces, ploughing way too much effort into how I looked, polishing the surface. Now I had gone the other way.

  ‘You don’t look awful,’ she said, too quickly. ‘I just meant that you seem very down.’

  I’d woken that morning to find mascara pooled in the creases at the corners of my eyes. My appointment for Botox and fillers had come and gone so the lines on my face – the number eleven between my brows, the brackets on either side of my nose – had crept back. I just didn’t have the energy to get it done and I wasn’t all that sure that I could afford it.

  I caught my sister’s eye. ‘Karen,’ I said, with emphasis, ‘I know I look like Elvis in his later period in Vegas. When he had the cape and rhinestones and the puffy face.’

  She spluttered with laughter. ‘Ah, Anita, I didn’t mean it like that.’ She pulled on the fag again and exhaled.

  I could barely see her through the smoke. We had grown up in a cloud of it, with Ma and Da puffing away like two wheezy chimneys, their fingers yellowed by the nicotine. They hadn’t even stopped when they had chest infections. Da would have an inhaler in one hand and a lit fag in the other. Even when Ma was diagnosed with cancer she hadn’t stopped. Karen had smoked from when she was about fourteen. And all my older brothers and sisters smoked. Not that I knew much about them. They’d all pretty much moved off by the time Karen and I arrived. They were fleeting presences that came and went occasionally, back from England and America. One up north. Another in Australia. They were of the age when people had left Ireland in droves in search of work – there used to be a national joke about the last person left turning out the lights.

  Karen and I were like a second family to Ma and Da. Ma thought she was done when she had my sister Jacqueline. Then, fifteen years later, Karen made her appearance. She was called a change-of-life baby. When I came along six years later, I was called a bloody miracle. So really there was only Ma, Da, Karen and me at home, all smoking.

  None of the Lawlors had ever smoked, apart from Frank, who kept it a deadly secret and was always on and off them. For a while, in the early days of our relationship, I’d enjoyed winding his family up, lighting cigarettes and taking long, hard, enjoyable drags. It was one of the few ways I could rebel. I’d given up when I’d fallen pregnant with Dylan.

  ‘Another cuppa?’ Karen asked, putting on the kettle.

  ‘Lovely,’ I lied. My tongue was hanging out of my head for a drink. I’d have sold my own granny for a glass of wine. I wasn’t telling Karen that. She’d passed a few critical remarks about my drinking. People in glass houses, I thought. I’d said nothing about her chain smoking. We all needed our little crutch.

  She put on the kettle. We were a family of tea drinkers. My ma had been able to do the housework with a cup and saucer balanced on her palm. Every single event in our lives had been punctuated with a cup of tea.

  The raucous sound of Karen’s daughter Colleen Eireann – a sweet-faced kid with two big bunches of black hair sticking out of the sides of her head – and her friend practising their Irish dancing in the hall drifted into the room.

  ‘It must be lonely in that big house,’ Karen said, still inspecting me.

  ‘The mornings are the worst,’ I heard myself say, in a flat, droopy voice. There was the awful moment of realization when I opened my eyes and it dawned on me yet again that he had gone. Images from the morning Frank left would run through my head. Me sinking to the ground, still in my blood-spattered rig-out, my cheek against the carpet. Still as a statue for hours. Like a dead animal that had been run over. Until Lena the cleaner had come upon me and had set down her bundle of ironed laundry on the floor, saying something in Polish that I didn’t understand.

  Karen unplugged the iron and folded up the board. I couldn’t imagine ironing now. My mother had taken in ironing to earn extra money. She had ironed and cleaned for other people, then come home and done it all over again for us.

  ‘In a funny sort of way I miss his snoring,’ I said, my eyes focusing on the brightly coloured children’s paintings plastered all over the wall. Karen’s kitchen was very kidcentric, I thought, visualizing the smooth
, expensive contours of my designer kitchen.

  I also missed the chance to give out about the toilet seat not being put down. I missed him driving up at night and coming in the door, saying, ‘Would somebody turn off a fucking light? This place is like an effin’ lighthouse.’

  Intending to change the subject, I said, ‘You have the place very nice, Karen.’

  Karen gave a little toss of her head but she looked pleased. ‘I got a bit of stuff from Habitat before it closed down,’ she said, lighting another fag from the last. ‘Darren and me drove up north to Ikea a couple of times. And you’d pick up a good bit of stuff in the Arnott’s sale.’

  ‘You were always a great shopper,’ I said. She was filling the kettle.

  ‘And you were always terrible with money,’ she said. ‘Speaking of which, have you spoken to him yet about the house and money?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I don’t want to be getting on your case, but you need to know where you stand.’

  The word ‘money’ made my ears ring. A sort of roaring in my head forced me to shut down the rogue thoughts that were trying to penetrate my brain. You have no money now. You are dependent on your husband who has left you. You rely on his charity.

  ‘Our whole family were shite with money,’ Karen added.

  It was true. I had spendthrift genes. There was never any extra money growing up, we were always in the red, but on the rare occasion that fortune shone on us – like when Da won money on a Spot the Ball competition or on the dogs – the money had been frittered immediately. Karen was the thrifty exception. Karen always had a few quid stowed away. She was the Bank of Butler – even Ma would borrow from her sometimes to get a bottle of milk or a packet of fags. At one point Karen had even considered charging interest on her short-term loans. She could have had a successful career as a money-lender.