The Better Half Page 7

  Karen shrugged. ‘Suitably named, that’s all I’m saying. What do you make of your woman?’ she said, puffing out a ring of smoke in her blithe yet assessing way. ‘She’s got a killer little figure on her. She looks fit as a butcher’s dog.’

  I said nothing. Biba Bailey was tall, tanned and blonde, with big boobs and gloss-covered lips that made a popping sound when she talked. She was very striking in a showy way. She’d turned up to the funeral, looking like the textbook young widow in an American soap, like she was playing a part. Short tight black dress like a bandage across her bottom, big black sunglasses, spiky-heeled black stilettos and a black handbag.

  ‘I’d say Dylan doesn’t know his luck,’ Karen said, poking me in the ribs.

  I slapped her away, half laughing. It wasn’t something you wanted to think about, your son getting jiggy with a girl. When she’d flung her long bare legs out of Dylan’s sports car, hips oscillating, I’d felt my breath catch in my chest. This was not the usual sort of girl Dylan had gone out with.

  ‘She’ll run rings around your Dylan,’ Karen said, with that special knack of hers for knowing what I was thinking.

  I watched Dylan put his hand on the small of Biba’s back. He was on the short side, like Frank, built like a brick shit house – he spent hours lifting weights in the gym. His hands were like shovels, just like his father’s. Ella had got the looks, but l loved my Dylan and his round open face. The baby whose tummy had been taut with colic so that I’d opened the poppers on his Babygro and let him kick his fat little legs. The small sweet boy with the freckles on his nose who’d flung his arms around my neck and said, ‘I love you, Mum.’ The happy, messy, enthusiastic teenager, who had been my special boy. The young man I hoped she wouldn’t hurt, with her suggestive sexy stride and skirt cut up to her bum.

  I would try not to judge her. Frank’s mam had done that with me: he had brought me home and I’d seen straight away that I wasn’t what Kathleen Lawlor had been hoping for. I could still remember the look on her face, like she’d swallowed a wasp. It had hurt. Worst of all, it had felt like a judgement on Ma and Da.

  She had been the cause of our first fight. Frank had asked me not to mention that I worked part-time as a hostess in a club in Leeson Street. I’d made some crack about how I was sorry I wasn’t a big ignorant camogie-playing heifer from Offaly with thighs like pink hams.

  I leant across for my drink. ‘You’ve got to let kids go,’ I said, drawing up a stool so that Karen followed suit.

  ‘I’m surprised Ella isn’t doing a line,’ Karen said, crossing her walnut-coloured legs, ‘lovely-looking girl like that.’

  ‘She is,’ I said.

  The boyfriend hadn’t come. It was too close to the exams, Ella had explained. He needed to study. You couldn’t blame him for that, she had said, but I could see that she was disappointed.

  ‘Your man has to study. He’s doing law like her. The father’s a judge,’ I said, regretting saying it the moment it came out of my mouth.

  And, of course, the boast wasn’t lost on Karen.

  ‘A judge!’ she said, in the sarky way that made me feel like an idiot.

  The lounge boy came up and offered us some chips from plastic baskets. Karen took a handful, shoving them into her mouth. ‘I’m starved,’ she said. ‘I’d murder a packet of Taytos.’ Karen mainlined Taytos. ‘Any chance of a packet of cheese and onion crisps?’ she asked, handing him a note.

  ‘It’s all paid for,’ he told her.

  ‘Go mad so and make it two packets,’ she said, and we both laughed.

  ‘Could I get more wine, please?’ I asked.

  ‘Anita, do you eat anything?’ Karen asked, when he’d gone and she was adjusting a gold hoop earring. ‘You look like a lat.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I lied. ‘Wrap dresses are very forgiving.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, grabbing her spare tyre. ‘I must get myself a magic dress so … You’re hitting the hooch fairly hard,’ she added, looking at my empty glass.

  ‘I’m sad.’

  ‘Right,’ Karen deadpanned. ‘I forgot you and Frank’s ma were so close.’ She was watching me out of the side of her eye.

  ‘I feel bad for Frank,’ I said. ‘He really loved his mother.’

  ‘God help him,’ Karen said.

  God help him was right, I thought, seeing Mam in front of me with her Yardley perfume, half-eaten packets of winegums, and small hard eyes, like rosary beads, lost in the dough of her pious face.

  She gave me a penetrating look.

  ‘Kathleen was his mother,’ I insisted. ‘Now that she’s gone …’ I felt a lump form in my gullet. I fattened my bottom lip. It was a major surprise that a bolt of lightning didn’t come out of the sky and strike me down, big fraudulent cow that I was. I didn’t give a rattling damn about Mam. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I said, as a tear rolled down my cheek.

  Karen was watching me closely now. ‘Anita, are you all right?’

  I wanted to tell her. I didn’t want to tell her. She’d have run over and got Frank in a head lock – and, let’s face it, she’d have been only too thrilled to do it. There was nothing to tell her anyway, I told myself. Frank and I were grand.

  But it would have been nice to share with somebody how it felt to have the bottom falling out of your world, to have your mind roiling and seething with images of your husband’s betrayal. It might have helped to share the shock of it. I wouldn’t, though.

  I raised a shoulder, then let it drop. ‘I’m grand, Karen,’ I said, wiping my face. ‘I’m tired, that’s all.’

  Karen said nothing, still watching me as I stared at my empty glass.

  We were staying with DJ and Mary. The Lawlor family place was a couple of fields over. They had closed it up so that its front was almost covered with brambles. Mam had moved in with DJ and Mary. It had been a condition of Frank building the house for them – a high price to pay for bricks and mortar, I thought.

  The Lawlor family home had never been a warm house to go to. There had always been an undertow of things not said, everyone tripping over each other to please Mam. I would have said it was a tense house with lots of pregnant pauses in the conversation. Karen had remarked on it the time she’d been down. ‘Christ almighty, they’re fucking miserable, so they are. You’d have more fun in a nunnery.’

  It had been an old farmhouse with the smell of damp and mice, and slug trails across the bedroom carpet in the morning. There were a few scrubby trees outside and some gorse bushes. Originally the Lawlors had a small-holding of marshy acidic fields, although to listen to DJ going on you’d be forgiven for thinking they were big ranchers.

  I could visualize ‘the good room’, dark and smelling musty, the slightly moist carpet, the dining-room table and chairs that had never been sat at or on. In the corner there had been a display cabinet full of Aynsley china, and two big porcelain dogs on the mantelpiece over the unlit grate. And there was Mam’s picture of the last pope – you felt he was eyeballing you no matter where you were in the room. The house was far bigger than Ma and Da’s flat, but for all its china dogs and the conspicuously positioned set of Encyclopaedia Britannica – which was so clean you knew nobody had ever consulted any of its volumes – there was something very dour about it.

  Don’t get me wrong. It was like a palace compared to where Karen and I had been brought up. Our tenement flat was part of a row of once-fancy Georgian townhouses with beautiful plum-coloured brick and fanlights. By the time we moved in, it had become a warren of flats that had the reputation of being rough. It wasn’t the whole story: there were plenty of decent hard-working people living there.

  There’d been a big, draughty pitch-black hallway, with bare walls and a bare concrete floor, that smelt of pee and frying and rubbish. You couldn’t have swung a cat in our flat. Karen and I had shared a bedroom with a thin partition separating it from the dingy little bathroom. We’d basically lived in one room. B
ut there had been a steady flow of visitors and constant chat. Ma and Da were sociable. That was the thing that always struck me about the Lawlors’ place: nobody ever visited. The few who were brave enough to knock on the door were frozen out and discouraged from returning. There was always a fault found with them afterwards. They stayed too long, talked too much. It was part of the reason Frank was so outgoing, I thought. And part of the reason he’d gone for me maybe: he was desperate for a bit of life and gas. Say what you like but Frank and I had had a lot of craic over the years.

  I closed the curtains. Night time was scary in the country, with bats dive-bombing you and strange noises and the feeling that eyes were looking at you from behind every weirdly shaped bush. There was something creepy about it. And you couldn’t call for help, like you could in the city. There was nobody for miles to hear you.

  I sank into a chair, bleary-eyed. I was quite pissed. Not as pissed as Frank and some of the crowd at the funeral, but well on all the same. I felt shattered with the strain of pretending I was crying for Mam and not for myself. I’d rot in hell, I thought, propping my head on my hand.

  My eyes watered. The room was dusty, and it had been tidied hastily. Things had been fired into the cupboard I’d opened. Not saying anything, but Mary wasn’t the best of housekeepers. To be fair, she’d done more than her share of running around after Mam. Mam had made a big stink about moving in with them but once she’d got her feet under the table she’d treated poor Mary like a slave.

  I was uptight when it came to cleaning. No matter how much help I had, I always ended up going over it myself. I sterilized my J-cloths every night – which said spades about my psyche, according to Ella. ‘Jesus, Mum, would you ever do something else with your time?’ she’d said to me one day, when she’d come across me dusting the frames of our paintings. ‘You’re always prowling around the house with an aerosol gun of detergent like it’s your mission in life. You’ll be out scrubbing the front step next,’ she’d said, in a voice tinged with a scorn that I’d found hurtful.

  Maybe all kids felt superior to their parents. Maybe it was in the nature of the beast. Maybe it was the job of kids to do that and parents not only expected it but wanted it in a funny kind of way. When I was growing up I would definitely have said that I wanted to be different from mine. That I loved them but thought I had something that would carry me away from them and from where I’d grown up.

  DJ and Mary owned a three-storey modern house with a portico, Ionic columns and more verandas and terraces than you could count. There were seven bedrooms and seven en-suite bathrooms with Japanese shoji sliding screens dividing each room. DJ’s fixation with bathrooms and bidets might have had something to do with the outside latrine. They had a gym in the basement and a hot tub out the back next to a monster patio. There was also a ‘Rapid River Pool’ designed specifically for exercise, although I was pretty sure DJ couldn’t swim, and by the look of Mary, she wasn’t exactly killing herself pounding up and down it. Anyway, DJ and Mary had really gone for it. But, then, Frank had built the house for free.

  I wondered if Mary was half blind. Even allowing for differences in taste, the décor was unbelievable: peach walls and a pinky sort of carpet. Actually, that was an insult to the visually impaired.

  A gleam of moonlight poked through into the room so that the edge of Frank’s face was highlighted. He was asleep on top of the bedspread, fully clothed, his hand drooping over the edge of the bed. He’d swayed upstairs and fallen down too tired to do anything bar shut his eyes. I had slipped his shoes off. A gentle snoring sound came from his slack mouth.

  Earlier Frank and I had shared a moment. It had been towards the end of the night. The crowd had started to thin.

  ‘Do you remember, Anita, bringing Mam here for dinner after we got engaged?’

  I did. Mam had sat in the front seat of Frank’s new car – a red Honda that he was so beside himself about getting that we’d practically had to have our picture taken with it. Mam had a headscarf on that we had given her, tied under her chin with a small tense knot. I couldn’t remember what we’d eaten. I think the waitress had offered us blue or black wine, meaning Blue Nun or Black Tower. Maybe I’d imagined that. Either way it was some sort of gut-rot altar wine, which we’d been thrilled with.

  Mam’s mouth had been screwed up like a ball of paper. I had caught her throwing savage glances at my belly, desperate to figure out if we had another announcement to make. I’d worked myself into a sweat trying to find things to say that might catch her interest. It had been an uphill struggle. Mam wasn’t having any of it. You couldn’t charm Mam. She was a harsh woman, born at a time when means were limited and grim lives full of struggle had led to grim people like her.

  Anyway, earlier Frank had laid his hand on my arm. ‘I was so proud of you,’ he’d said, smiling at me. He’d been proud showing me off to his mother.

  I’d tried to fake a smile but I’d started crying again and Frank had thought the tears were for Mam. ‘You’re a great girl, Anita,’ he’d said. ‘You’ve been a great wife and a great mother. And a great daughter-in-law,’ he added expansively, which was over-egging it a bit, but I wasn’t about to query him when he was on this sort of a complimentary roll.

  We did have lots of mileage on the clock, I thought. You couldn’t just dismantle a life like that. I compressed my lips, my eyes lighting on Frank’s phone. It had slid from his pocket onto the floor. It was on the carpet, kind of calling out to me. Normally he guarded it as if it were the Crown Jewels – which, in light of recent developments, made sense.

  I stood up and crossed the room. He was out for the count, I thought, bending down to retrieve the phone. It was still on. My heart started to pound. It was a massive invasion to read someone’s text messages – like reading their post. I stood there for a while, clutching the phone, debating with myself. There were sounds downstairs. Mary: maybe clearing away the last of the things. We’d had a cup of tea when we’d come back. She’d opened a packet of biscuits.

  ‘They’re gone mad with the hospitality, cracking open a packet of biscuits,’ Frank had whispered into my ear. I’d burst out laughing and it had been like old times. Frank was funny. He had what you call comic timing. There had been times over the years when I’d almost wet myself at some of his impressions.

  In some ways it had been a nice day. I had been glad of Frank’s words. But he had betrayed me. I went into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. Avoiding my reflection in the mirror and my guilty eyes, I turned on the tap to cover the beeping noise of the phone. First I scanned the received messages. This took a while. There were around five hundred in his inbox. Frank was always on the blower. There was nothing much, just business stuff. A few about golf. One or two dirty jokes from a fella he knew – a contractor from Limerick. I was a bit surprised by that: your man looked like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

  Next I turned my attention to Frank’s sent messages. My heart was racing as I scrolled down. Then it nearly stopped: Women r oft late. Big deal. Stop stressing n it’ll cum. x Frank.

  My knees buckled. Bile and wine rose up in my throat. The phone fell from my fingers. I bent over the loo, shuddering and twitching, as I puked my guts up.

  4

  Time had passed and nothing had happened. The issue of Little Miss Big Knockers was receding like a boat crossing a distant horizon. A boat, once large and dominating the view in the harbour, that was now a tiny speck. I could feel it in my waters.

  She wasn’t pregnant, after all. Frank had lost interest. The fright had brought them to their senses. You couldn’t be expecting a baby with another woman and stand there at the island – a lump of extortionately expensive granite floating in the vast ocean that was our kitchen – as Frank had done earlier, and squeeze oranges with your family watching you. We were sitting around the table. We were the Waltons. It was an achievement just to have Frank there. Normally he was absent, or jumping up and down from th
e table taking calls, often shouting things down the phone like ‘See you in court, pal.’

  I had come to an uneasy accommodation with Frank’s fling. I wasn’t engaging in self-deception. Frank had made a mistake. His affair had been recreational, not serious. He had had a mid-life crisis. Okay, I’d have preferred him to buy an even faster car or to take up bungee jumping or something relatively benign to get his kicks but I could live with it. I could forgive him, I thought, as he smiled at something Ella was saying.

  ‘A stiff dick has no conscience,’ as Karen rather crudely put it – and Jesus said forgive your neighbour, even if he was your fecking stupid husband swinging it about so that he deserved to have it chopped off, like that Bobbitt eejit in America.

  Not that I was a member of the God Squad. I was never that gone on religion. When I was small I went through a pious phase of being devoted to the Virgin Mary, or Holy Mary as I had called her, because I was cast as her in our Nativity play. I sort of got my head turned. Next thing you knew I was erecting May-day altars in my bedroom.

  ‘Oh, for feck’s sake,’ Karen had said, watching me put a jam-jar of flowers on a piece of grubby lace, ‘you’re not right in the head.’

  During that time I had loved going to Mass with Ma, skipping down to the church beside her, Ma with her good headscarf knotted under her chin, me carrying her missal with the navy leather cover. Really, I got off on the melodrama. It was nothing to do with spirituality: it was about being girlishly pure and good – and a big lick-arse, as Karen would have pointed out. And I’d loved the iconography and the incense and the singing. Karen had only gone when the priest from the Missions came. The word would go round that he’d give a bit of a sex talk and the place would be packed to the rafters.

  Now we were eating breakfast in the kitchen, like four ants in a football stadium. Frank was tired. He’d been on Morning Ireland, one of Ireland’s most listened-to radio programmes, giving his view on the state of the economy and how his development was NOT in jeopardy. He’d sounded animated and confident, his voice manly and fearless, that of a thrusting alpha male.