The Better Half Page 6

  There had been no mention of Frank’s father. He’d been written out of the script. He hadn’t been violent or a drinker. He seemed to have been filed as a non-event. Mam had ruled the roost. Frank hadn’t said much about his da. He had been a shy man, I gathered, who liked to eat lumps of butter, which might have gone some way towards explaining why he was claimed quite early by his angina. And Mam had been carted off by a heart attack. I worried about Frank, whose lips could often look blue.

  The undertakers were letting the coffin down into the black hole now. That was always the hard part, closing the coffin for the last time and lowering it down into the grave. My heart had nearly broken when I had buried my own ma and da.

  Frank’s shoulders were hunched and his face was ashen. I felt a tidal rush of sadness. My husband, the husband I hoped wouldn’t leave me. I wanted to take his round red fleshy face in my hands, kiss him and tell him it would be all right, and that we would be all right.

  The boy brought over another round of drinks. We’d gone back to the local hotel, the Enniskane Arms. The lounge had yellow walls. The carpet, with its big swirly pattern, had a slightly sticky feel. A sign for ‘Gourmet Food’ hung over the carvery, which was closed, the stainless-steel bain-maries empty. There was a slightly musty smell in the room mixed with the stink of overcooked vegetables.

  ‘Sure it’s grand,’ DJ had said, two evenings before, when the topic of where we’d go after the funeral came up. His house had been the obvious choice – but Mary wasn’t gone on having people back to the house. She was a bit weird like that. She was on the excitable side, too, something to do with her thyroid. That was why she had the bulgy eyes.

  ‘It’s meanness pure and simple,’ Karen had said, blowing out a cloud of smoke. ‘They wouldn’t give you the steam off their piss. Do you remember years ago when DJ came up to Dublin and stayed with you and you said that he ate an orange in his room because he was afraid he might have to share it with the kids?’ Karen forgot very little.

  Frank had wanted a sit-down meal but the hotel couldn’t provide it for the numbers that were bound to come. Or, at least, that was DJ’s interpretation of the matter. They’d laid on soup and sandwiches, sausages, chips and chicken wings, with a radioactive-looking sauce, and mini pizzas. It wasn’t what Frank wanted but he was cute enough not to say anything.

  The place was packed to the rafters. People had come from the four corners to pay their respects. And for the free gargle. It was nice, actually, everyone coming together to mark the end of somebody’s life.

  ‘Nothing like a good funeral,’ Karen said, helping herself to a chicken wing and dunking it in the sauce.

  She was like a mind-reader. ‘I think I prefer them to weddings,’ I said.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she agreed.

  Weddings could be nice – but they could also be very competitive. People getting married in foreign locations, brides flying here, there and everywhere to get their dress, pressure over presents, over-the-top hen and stag dos.

  Frank had a pint of Guinness in his hand, and his brothers, cousins and half the county of Offaly were swarming around him. There were lots of country faces – there was a difference in them, I thought, from the way my da’s face had been urban through and through.

  ‘It’s weird to see Dad in this context,’ Ella said, suddenly beside me.

  We watched him smile and shake the hand of some old fella. I felt a pang. It reminded me of the Frank I’d known long before he learnt to sniff Château Pétrus this and Grand Cru that and to swirl them around his glass. Frank Lawlor had drunk pints of the black stuff.

  Frank wasn’t really the big man down here, just one of the Lawlors – a local boy done good for himself – in a place where people had known his father and grandfather. Frank had smarts. He’d never throw his weight around at home. He knew that you couldn’t get too above yourself when you went back. Not where your people were known and where, despite your heavy watch and shiny shoes, you still, as Frank put it to me once when he was drunk, had ‘the imprint of the enamel bucket on your arse’ – when he was very young the Lawlors had had no inside toilet. Not that I was casting judgement on this. In our flats, my own family had shared a bathroom with two other families.

  ‘These are Dad’s people,’ I added, smiling at my daughter.

  ‘They’re your people too, Ella,’ Karen said, pulling her leg.

  Ella’s face tightened. It had been a bit of a shock for her to meet some of her relatives, to know that she came from the same gene pool. One fella had come to her in a shabby old raincoat – he’d looked like he was carved out of bog oak – and told her he was her cousin. Her bright, polite smile didn’t reach her eyes, which told me she was rattled.

  Frank had been good about going home to see his mother but he had mainly gone on his own. Once the kids had got a bit bigger they hadn’t wanted to go.

  ‘She’s only teasing you, love,’ I said to Ella, patting her stiff shoulder.

  Ella and Dylan weren’t used to being slagged, not like us when we were growing up when there had been no let-up.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Ella said, shrugging. She wasn’t used to Karen’s humour because she didn’t really know her aunt. The strangeness of that thought hit me. Our family had been a tight-knit bunch, at least when Ma and Da were alive. They’d have been stunned to think that my sister and my daughter were virtual strangers.

  ‘Your ma tells me you’re a total genius at school,’ Karen said. Her accent was stronger. She did that around anyone she encountered from my current life – gave them a blast of ‘Dublin in the rare oul times’. This, of course, was to wind me up and to draw attention to how uppity I’d got.

  Ella rolled her eyes.

  ‘Well, you are,’ I said.

  Ella pulled another face.

  ‘She thinks I go on about it too much,’ I said to Karen.

  ‘Just like our ma so,’ Karen said drily.

  ‘Ma did not go on about me and school.’

  Karen threw her head back and laughed. ‘I’ve heard it all now.

  ‘Fair enough, your ma got the best Leaving Certificate that anyone ever got in our flats but Ma and Da, your grandparents that you never met,’ she said, nodding at Ella, ‘bored the backside off anyone who would listen.’

  I didn’t remember that. ‘Ella’s in a totally different league to me,’ I said, feeling a burst of maternal pride. ‘Straight As,’ I added.

  Ella crossed her eyes.

  ‘Your mother was a genius at maths,’ said Karen, ‘and I’m not joking.’

  ‘She’s been drinking,’ I said to Ella, pleased all the same.

  ‘Don’t mind her,’ Karen said. ‘She was a proper little swot and she was always teacher’s pet at school.’

  I was too. I loved school. Never missed a day if I could help it. When I was in primary I used to go in early – always spotless even though Ma had no washing-machine and no drier. I’d help the teacher get the classroom ready. I’d wipe the board for her and put out fresh chalk and feed the class hamster. I had been in my element. In secondary I’d been waiting outside the gates for the caretaker to open up.

  I had loved having my own desk, seat and coat hook. I had loved the way the pens and copies, pencils, rubbers and toppers were yours. I came from a house where bodies were densely packed in and everyone ‘borrowed’ your things, so the order that had prevailed at school had been a dream.

  I still remembered the pleasure I had derived from practising my writing on the blue and red lines, later from writing my name with a flourish on the front of my copies. And the praise I had received for all of this had been like a drug.

  ‘She’s very ambitious,’ my class teacher had said once to a baffled Ma.

  She was wrong there. I hadn’t been ambitious at all. My hunger for approval had been confused with ambition. It was praise I was after. I had figured out that I was good at something – mat
hs – and that I not only enjoyed it but got recognition for it too.

  ‘That’s some accent she’s got on her,’ Karen said, as we watched Ella drift over to Frank, who had beckoned to her.

  ‘It’s the school she went to,’ I said defensively.

  ‘How d’ye know ET was a Protestant?’ Karen asked.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Because he looked like one,’ she said, and laughed.

  ‘Very funny,’ I said, smiling.

  We’d sent Ella to a posh Protestant school where we’d paid a small fortune for the ‘cultured’ accent. It had been Frank’s idea. A lot of our Catholic friends sent their children to Protestant schools because of their ‘lovely, free, open attitude to education’ – or because they were ‘disillusioned with the Catholic Church’ after all the sex scandals. These were some of the many reasons put forward. Frank had been more up front as to why he’d plumped for the Prods.

  ‘That’s a load of bollocks if I ever heard it,’ he had roared one night at a dinner party, slamming his hand on the table. ‘Go on out of that,’ he’d said. I had been half admiring, half mortified. I had always had a split attitude to Frank saying the unsayable. Mainly I cringed, but my embarrassment was usually tinged with a sort of pride in his boldness. ‘Let’s call a spade a spade,’ he had gone on. ‘You’re doing it for the same reason as us. Because you can’t beat the Prods for the auld bit of polish and, like us, you’re willing to pay for it now you’ve got a few shekels in your back pocket.’

  There had been a chorus of indignant protest but Frank didn’t care.

  ‘Your parents wouldn’t have dreamt of sending you to Protestant schools. Imagine you lot, with names like feckin’ Maeve and Ciara, schlepping up to a Protestant school. Are you feckin’ joking me? But, by Jaysus, Maximilian and Madison and Camilla, and whatever the feck you’ve called your kids, will be sent,’ he’d said, and another storm of protest had broken out. Ciara had looked like somebody had poured a bottle of vinegar down her gullet. Any hint that she might be into reinvention or social climbing sent her into orbit.

  ‘I know I’m right,’ Frank had said afterwards.

  Frank was never slow to point out what he considered to be other people’s pretensions, even though he harboured quite a few himself, the sort of notions that had led him to consider a coat of arms for our house and the turrets. But that was fairly typical of human nature. It was easier to spot these things in other people.

  ‘Ella’s the head off you,’ Karen said, jiggling the ice in her glass.

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Yeah, I do. Obviously not the colouring since you dyed your hair blonde but she’s good-looking and brainy,’ she said.

  I found myself going a bit red. Karen was not known for lavishing praise.

  ‘And she’s a bit stuck-up like you and all,’ she added.

  ‘I’m not stuck-up.’

  ‘Go on out of that, Mrs Bouquet,’ she said, looking straight at me. ‘You had a high hole on ya as far back as I can remember. You were always into being poshie. You had notions when you were in your cot.’

  And look where that had got me, I thought, taking a slug of my wine.

  ‘You must be very proud of her all the same,’ Karen said, popping a stick of gum into her mouth.

  ‘I am,’ I said, feeling bad I couldn’t think of much to say about Karen’s lot. She had three kids. They were a fair bit younger than mine because, although Karen was older, she’d married much later. They were called Derry, Saoirse and Colleen Eireann, the names chosen on account of Karen’s Darren being as mad into the idea of the Irish language as he was the dream of a united Ireland.

  I’d sent them presents for birthdays and Christmas, and cash for Communions and Confirmations, but I knew very little about my nieces and nephew other than that they went to the school Karen and I had gone to in the Liberties. And that Derry was mad into GAA football and the girls were big into the Irish dancing. I’d been a crap auntie. I rarely visited them. And they hardly ever came to ours, mainly because I hardly ever invited them.

  Karen was looking around the bar, her jaws moving rhythmically. ‘This lot are some bunch of carrot-crunchers all the same,’ she said, reaching for her wine. ‘Would you look at that one passing behind Frank?’ she said. I tried to shush her. ‘Love,’ she said, pretending to cup her hands to her mouth, ‘the eighties called and they want their style of dressing back. Or that fella over there like some sort of natural-selection slip-up. I wouldn’t be surprised if he waved at planes.’

  Our family were Dubs back as far as you could go and we were brought up thinking that culchies were a bit slow, even though everyone knew that Dublin was full of boggers who basically ran the nation. It was particularly ironic that, as children, we were encouraged to think we were a cut above, given that we hadn’t a pot to piss in. I mean, we weren’t exactly a bunch of high rollers.

  ‘Aren’t you lucky Ella didn’t take after them? They look like a pack of Munchkins.’

  ‘Ah, they’re not that bad, Karen,’ I said. Secretly I was very relieved my daughter didn’t take after that side of the family physically. Not saying anything but they were a bit vertically challenged and their noses were on the big side.

  Karen stuck a finger under her eye and pulled it down. ‘Would you go on out of that? That fella is no oil painting,’ she said, pointing at one of Frank’s brothers. ‘And only a mother could love that face,’ she said, indicating Frank’s youngest brother. She cocked an eye. ‘And would you look at DJ’s chisellers there – with the snozzes on them, they look like the direct descendants of Cyrano de Bergerac.’

  I thought of telling her to mind the language but that would have made her worse. Tell Karen to do anything and you were guaranteed she would do the opposite. Instead I popped back at her so that she actually coloured, ‘They could have been your kids too, Karen.’

  Getting Karen to feel embarrassed was some achievement. She and DJ had shifted at our wedding.

  ‘Ah, here,’ she said, nodding towards the bar, ‘if you go on like that I’ll need another large brandy.’ She shook her head so that the black bits underneath her platinum hair were exposed. ‘I can’t believe I let Chopper Teeth suck the face off me. I must have been desperate.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s all you did?’ I asked. She went puce again.

  We looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  ‘Listen, I’d rather shag the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and that’s a fact,’ Karen said, still a bit flushed.

  I eyeballed her mock-innocently. ‘But back then …’

  ‘Would you go on out of that!’ she growled, half laughing, half scowling. Then her expression changed. ‘Can you believe this bunch of muppets looked down on us at the wedding?’ Her eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Don’t say you don’t remember, Anita,’ she said sourly. ‘Frank’s ma looking over at us like she’d smelt something bad. And the Brothers Grimm acting like they were some big deal in their suits,’ she said, making a poor stab at a culchie accent.

  We’d had a reception in the Shelbourne Hotel, which was a major big deal. All my older brothers and sisters had had their dos in pubs. Frank and his brothers had been stuffed inside suits like the cast from a second-rate Mafia movie. Da had been scratchy in a suit, his shoes scuffed, screwing up his face at the taste of the wine. I’d been mortified. In the end I’d relented and let him drink bottles of stout. Ma had been decked out in powder pink. She’d rented a hat. She’d sipped sherry until two bright pink spots to match her rig-out had appeared on her cheeks.

  We’d had melon or chilled orange juice to start. Then chicken and ham. Late in the evening our uncle Robbie had had to be stopped from singing ‘Her eyes they shone like diamonds’ over and over again, the pint still in his hand as he swayed forward, his eyes shut, the remains of the wedding cake next to him. I shouldn’t have let Uncle Robbie, in his blue serge suit, sing. I regret
ted it now. But I had felt raw, my skin exposed. I wanted the Butlers to be good enough for the Lawlors.

  Our crowd had stayed on one side of the reception room, the Lawlors on the other. It was clear that, even then, the Lawlors had seen themselves as a cut above. Our gang were shite with money. They’d managed to get through the boom and not made a penny. Even my brothers and sisters who’d gone to America had done a fair job of sidestepping the American dream. The Lawlors, though, had made a few quid. Now they owned half of Enniskane. Back then at the wedding, they’d had nothing but a couple of stony grey fields and a broken-down Massey Ferguson tractor but they were the posh ones. Our mud hut is nicer than yours, that sort of thing. Ma and Da had retreated into themselves. Not able to deal with that. They were gentle people. They had real manners so they did. Ma, in her own old Dublin way, was genteel and ladylike.

  ‘It’s a long time ago, I can’t really remember,’ I said to Karen, so that I didn’t egg her on. She could get bolshy with a couple of jars on her and I didn’t want to be digging up old resentments. ‘You and DJ did your bit to keep things cordial anyway.’ That shut her up quick time.

  Two old fellas were discussing football next to us.

  ‘We’ve it all to do now …’

  ‘We’re going through a bit of turmoil all right …’

  ‘’Tis a dangerous carry-on when you start pussyfooting around players …’

  ‘Darren would love this,’ said Karen. Darren was mad into the GAA. ‘Father Willy is delighted with himself anyway.’ She nodded to where the priest was talking to Biba’s chest. He was a small, colourless slip of a man, with a narrow papery face. ‘I know where he’d like to stick his feckin’ willy.’

  ‘Jesus, Karen, would you keep your voice down?’ She was like the bloody town crier.

  ‘Get up on a gust of wind, I’d say,’ she said, her eyes fastened on them. ‘Look at him. He’s like a dog in heat talking to Biba’s tits.’

  ‘Christ, Karen, sssh!’