The Importance of Being Me Read online

  Also by Caroline Grace-Cassidy

  The Week I Ruined My Life

  First published 2017

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  This electronic edition published in 2017

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 130 8 in EPub format

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 124 7 in paperback format

  Copyright © Caroline Grace-Cassidy 2017

  The right of Caroline Grace-Cassidy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire, Newtonmore

  For my sister, Samantha.

  There is no better friend than a sister.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 2

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part 3

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  A Letter from the Author

  part 1

  1

  “What has she got that I haven’t got anyway?” I lament.

  “Botox!” Claire responds without missing a beat.

  I had just put fork to mouth, taking a monumental bite from her home-made banoffee pie. Banana, toffee and biscuit making my acquaintance: very pleased to meet you, my saccharine-tasting comrades. As the flavours erupt in my mouth I shut my eyes briefly in wondrous appreciation. God, I bloody love cake! Cake and a cup of hot strong tea. Easily pleased these days.

  On opening my peepers, I see Claire smirking and spinning herself around on her stylish chrome high stool. It’s one of those modern-type stools that wouldn’t look out of place in outer space. Trendy. In vogue. Round and round she goes, pushing herself off the marble kitchen island with every turn to gain traction, like a beautiful, yet obviously disturbed, type of woman-child. Then she halts. Regaining her focus on me, she gathers her dizzy head together. Palms of her hands resting over each ear, she raises her sienna eyebrows as high as she can, pulling her soft, freckled skin taut across her cheekbones. I actually have to cover my mouth with my whole hand before I choke. It’s uncanny. She is the spitting image of . . . her. The look is hysterical. I begin to shake with laughter. Claire’s eyes are pulled up so high they are almost popping out of their sockets. This is the look of beauty. Hollywood says so. I think Hollywood needs its Hollyhead checked, passing this look off as beautiful. What am I saying? I can’t blame the rich and famous of La La Land any more – it’s the look of our generation, right? I’m weary with contempt at how hard it is for women to age gracefully. When did age become such a brutal thing? Such a taboo? Didn’t it used to be a rite of passage? A time to finally just be yourself. A well-earned thing. My Granny Alice embraced it. To be honest, she couldn’t wait for it. Alice always sang to me the importance of being yourself and embracing where you are in life.

  “Don’t look too far back, Courtney. You’re not going that way.”

  Alice would always tell me that, before she was robbed of her brilliant mind by dementia in her sixties. She had been my go-to person for everything in my life. Alice would just listen and pick me up, place me high upon that pedestal she so fondly held me on. Alice had embraced getting older: the purple rinse, the comfortable Softspot shoes, the free bus travel, the OAP offers. Now it’s a dying generation of women. Older ladies as we once knew them are a dying breed, but I want to be one. I want to see them still represented in society. I want that wheeled trolley that all your shopping fits into. No more carrying or paying for evil plastic bags. I want the OAP half-portion roast beef and potatoes and two veg and a dessert. I want people to give me a seat on the bus if it’s full. I will have earned that much. For what reason do none of us want to age any more? I know one thing for sure: I want to not care what the mirror shows me some day. Just like Granny Alice. I’m eagerly anticipating that feeling. That acceptance. That freedom.

  Claire remains frozen in time. She pouts her lips now in a ludicrous way and I jerk my head downwards still chewing. I cannot laugh. I must not laugh. With this mouthful, it will not be pretty if I do. Plus Claire’s kitchen is absolutely spotless and I don’t want to be responsible for wrecking all that Herculean work. Looking firmly at my black-and-white triple-striped runners, I chew faster the large wedges of banana. Determined to get it down, I swallow carefully. A banoffee spit festival avoided.

  “You are quite correct, Mrs Carney, take a gold star from Ryan Gosling’s unrivalled backside.” I laugh freely before I lick the white cream from the prongs on my fork, musing on Ryan Gosling’s firm bottom all the time. I feel like doing my happy dance, but I remain seated.

  “Oh that I could. Actors, yes . . . but especially professional tennis players . . . Give me a bit of 1990s Agassi! Totally delicious, with or without the wig!” She moans out the words seductively and licks her lips now.

  “Claire!” I laugh at her boldness.

  “What? Just because you have willingly entered the nunnery! I’m still a full-figured, too-hot-to-handle hot-blooded woman.” She shimmies her shoulders at me then makes a peace sign, a little like a Spice Girl might have done. Geri mainly. She’s showing her age, but I won’t tell her that.

  “Eh, a hot-blooded happily married woman!” I hiss quietly across at her.

  “Actually, Courtney, as a very happily married woman of fifteen years no less, I rely heavily on my imagination to keep it that way, I will have you know! That’s how I keep it mucky in the bedroom. Every time Andy Murray has that shirt over his head at Wimbledon, showing off that rippling torso, I blink my eyes several times and take imaginary photos for my mind’s memory bank. Click. Click. Click. Martin still maintains he fancies me, but Jaysus, with the lights off maybe. We’d be lost without the ole Internet for some sexual . . . well . . . for want of a better word, stimulation.”

  I hold up my hand immediately and she stops dead.

  “Thank you! TMI!” I shout at her and she laughs.

  She blinks over and over and over now and says, “How is it we talk about the whole kit and caboodle but you never want to hear about my sex life?” Screws up her nose, freckles waltzing.

  “It’s just not me . . . I don’t talk like that . . . It’s private.” I shiver for dramatic effect.

  “I know you don’t have one!”

  “Well, since, as you rightly point out, I don’t have a sex life, I have no gross bits to share.” I shrug my shoulders.

  “Sex isn’t gross, Courtney! It’s bloody marvellous!” She does that sexy move with her shoulders again while rolling her tongue around her bottom lip. I shake my head in full amusement at my friend and sip my tea. Everything there is to know about Claire Carney I already know: her electronic bedroom antics with Martin she can keep to herself, thank you very much.

  “However, we really should stop teasing her behind her back at thi
s stage, it’s not very nice. I don’t mind it when I’m with you, but later on I feel very uncomfortable with myself. Bitchiness was never something I did well or was comfortable with.” I grimace at her, referring to her earlier impressive impersonation.

  “Oh for God’s sake, why ever not? She doesn’t deserve not to be teased behind her back! She puts the bitch in bitchiness! Bloody cheek of her! Bloody plastic cow! Moo!” Claire rubs her strained eyes after all that blinking as she rotates the stool again.

  “Ah, come on, Claire, mocking is catching.” I appeal to her softer side.

  “Moo!” she repeats, then adds as she spins round, “What a favour she did you, though, Courtney: you and I both know that to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Mar-need David, Courtney no-need David. Good riddance!” Claire says as she goes round and round again on her kitchen travels. Ignoring her now, I drink my tea and examine my nails. Much in need of a polish. What is it they say, a pop of colour? The most overused expression in the world. Claire eventually stops in front of me and shakes her index finger firmly from side to side before she pulls the thin gold butterfly clip from her short red hair. She recklessly uses her teeth to re-open the slide and then fixes it back in her side fringe, taking it all back off her face. Tidier. Everything about Claire Carney is tidy. If she were a Little Miss book she’d be a mixture of Little Miss Tidy, Little Miss Neat and, well, between you and me, Little Miss OCD.

  “She really did, I know that much. Ah, look, we both know I hadn’t needed David for years.” I fiddle with my fork on the side of my ornate Chinese-letter-decorated dessert plate and sit back, but not before I dance my baby finger around the edges collecting abandoned cream. I suck. Holy moly but it’s good. Claire makes the most amazing banoffee pie. Claire makes Mary Berry look like a junior Bake Off contestant. She is really that talented. I keep telling her she should open her own bakery shop. In fact, she would tell you I’ve been harassing her for years to get her finger out. Granted, she has been making cakes for occasions from home for a few years now – masterpieces, I think – but that’s why I know she can open her own place. Claire gets loads of orders locally for birthdays, christenings, weddings, and she can make a work of art.

  We bond often over our mutual love of cooking and eating. I’m the savoury to her sweet. Cooking is something I both love and need to do. It’s my passion. When I’m making food, I’m relaxed and totally in the moment. It all stems back to when Granny Alice would cook for me: it wasn’t just dinner she was making, it was something different, something magical. It was theatre. Alice would make me taste her food as she cooked and guess the ingredients. She would sing opera while she cooked and tasted and ooh-ed and ah-ed, adding a pinch of this here and scattering a smidgen of the other there. Her Italian-born mother lived on. Legend had it Alice’s mother Virginia once cooked her seafood linguine for royalty, but that’s as far as the story goes! We had so much gaiety over food. A shared passion. Plus in those days I was proper hungry, you know? I ate porridge for my breakfast, then a light lunch and a hearty dinner. No snacks. No sweets except home-made desserts on a Friday. When I’m eating the food I prepare myself now, I feel sunniness, vim and vigour. Food and I have a very special relationship.

  But I’m losing my train of thought. That’s what food does to me! What I should be telling you is who Claire and I are laughing about. It’s the woman my husband of fourteen years left me for. Mar-nee. Mar-nee Maguire. No, the hyphen is not a spelling mistake, that’s how Mar-nee spells her name. Mar-nee is a beautician. A beautiful beautician, or so the world is trying to brainwash us to believe. Like I said, if that look is beautiful, I am clinically blind. Hopefully I am not on my own in my antipathetic opinion. Mar-nee has had a lot of work done to her face and other body parts. To be perfectly honest, it’s hard to tell where plastic Mar-nee starts and human Mar-nee ends. We surmise, of course. David tells me categorically she is all natural, but of course she absolutely is not. She’s definitely had fillers, as well as copious amounts of Botox in her forehead and around her eyes. Her eyebrows are so high they nearly hit her hairline, giving her the expression of someone who has just seen their parents having sex. Not to mention those bee-stung lips: so awfully bee-stung they must have enraged a ten-frame Langstroth hive of expectant queen bees! Then there is her chest area: let’s just say it arrives a long time before she does. Mar-nee also has all that fake hair, a gazillion curly extensions, the colour ever changing. So much hair that whenever I see her I can’t help wondering if in a past life she was indeed a little MarMaid. Tall. And rake thin. Obviously. But here’s the thing. Mar-nee is who she is. Not my cup of tea, but what is one person’s nightmare is another person’s dream come true. Claire says that Mar-nee stole my husband from me. I do not concur. I think that Mar-nee met a very unhappy man who was fixing her stubborn blocked beauty salon toilet and just got to know him. Then she fell in love with him. Then took her chance. Oh, I have no doubt she encouraged the affair and then pushed him to leave me, but hey, c’est la vie. He’s the one with the balls: he should have used them!

  Now, I know this might sound like I’m telling you a great big dirty lie to protect myself, to save face, but I promise you I’m not. When I found out that David was having this affair, I didn’t care. At all. I swear. I’d been expecting it for years. In a way, I think I’d been hoping for it. Subconsciously pushing him towards it. For example, when I was going through a self-help phase and reading The Secret, I asked the universe to make David happy. Subconsciously I knew what I was asking for: the problem was that I knew I couldn’t make him happy because, you see, he couldn’t make me happy.

  Sometimes in my head, late at night or early in the morning over his slurpy Crunchy Nut breakfasts, I would dream up scenarios where David would meet another woman and move out. Leave me be. It’s terrible, I know, but I’m telling you because it’s the truth. And listen, I’m no dummy: I’d had all the usual affair clues in the months leading up to it. David was no Oscar-winning Al Pacino. He couldn’t have dumbed down the signs even if he had bothered to try. He smelled different, and by different I mean he started to wear copious amounts of spray deodorant to work, soon followed by actual aftershave. I don’t think he had even owned a bottle of aftershave since we were on our two-week honeymoon in Majorca, when I gifted him a bottle of Fahrenheit in the duty free on the way out there.

  He also began to dress . . . well, again, differently. David’s normal look was black jeans, a black shirt and black shoes. That was all he ever wore as far back as I can remember. His homage to his idol Johnny Cash, he used to joke. As the affair garnered momentum, he began to wear strange clothes. At first it was just a faded denim jacket, then this very out-of-character, swimming-cap-type white beanie hat. He came home one day with a huge Brown Thomas designer store bag. He had shuffled in the back door (no one uses the back door in our house except to put recycling in the green bin or to throw seeds out to the birds) and he was unlike himself. Shifty. Jumpy. Cagey. He’d ignored me diligently stirring the cream sauce for my seafood linguine at the cooker and walked swiftly past. For a second, a split second, I wondered had he bought me a gift. As I removed the herbs from my sizzling sauce, I’d heard him moving about upstairs. About twenty minutes later, he came back down and shouted into the kitchen from the hallway that he had to go out for a few hours, that the beautician’s shop he was fixing the plumbing in was squealing again. (David called people who complained about his workmanship ‘squealers’. We had a lot of them.) A heavy penny dropped in my mind. I turned off the heat, ruining my linguine, and a sniff of further destruction to come had filled my head.

  Creeping out of the kitchen into the front room and pulling back my heavy silver curtains just a smidgen, I’d peered out the window. There he was, my husband, looking at his reflection in the wing mirror of his white David Downey Plumbers 24/7 work van. In shock, I’d dropped the curtain, and when I’d grabbed it and pulled it back again my mouth fell open.

  “What the actual
hell?” I’d whispered into the curtain. He was dressed in sky-blue second-skin skinny jeans and a leather motorbike jacket zipped to his chin, with blazing white runners – those big ones kids wear. He was fixing his hair with his fingertips so it stood on end. He’d looked like one half of Jedward or, should I say, Dadward. Or should I say just plain awkward.

  “Maybe, just maybe, be careful what you’ve wished for, Courtney,” I’d whispered to no one as I watched him pull himself up into his van, check his face one more time in his rear-view mirror, scrub his teeth with his index finger and reverse out of the driveway. Slowly I’d dropped the curtain, walked back into my small kitchen and scraped the sauce into a Tupperware. Then I’d opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of cold beer. Twisting the cap off, I’d leaned against the back door and drunk the bottle back in a few gulps. Relief had flooded through every part of my body. It was hard to put into words how I’d felt, but bizarrely the main word, I think, was hopeful. Hopeful that he was going to leave me. Or hopeful that now I knew he was having an affair I’d cop on and fight hard to get him back. Hopeful that my life was going to change, one way or the other.

  And then I had said nothing. Done nothing. Questioned nothing. The blinkers were well and truly in place. Even when he’d arrived home that same night, hours later, flush-faced, whistling nervously and in the most incredible mood. I simply blocked it out of my mind as I got on with day-to-day living. In my own head, I couldn’t figure out what to do. Over the next few weeks, as I let it sink in, I’d observed him as he treated his mobile phone like a suitcase with a soon-to-be-detonated bomb in it. He watched that phone like Jason Bourne. Occasionally, just to rile him, I’d ask him could I use his phone, pretending I couldn’t find mine. He’d turn a whiter shade of pale.