The Importance of Being Me Read online

  “If you weren’t my best friend, I’d hate you. I’d give you filthy looks in the street. You always look amazing and hardly ever try. Me, I never look amazing and I always bloomin’ well try. Try to hide every flabby inch on my ever-expanding torso.” Claire pats her stomach now. Then pretends to use it as a punchbag. “G-g-g-gas . . . G-g-g-gastric . . .” She holds her fleshy tummy between her two hands.

  “Stop,” I say softly. I know only too well how much Claire struggles with her weight and it’s a daily battle of self-destruction, starvation and bingeing. Claire has done every diet known to man. She’s lived off apples and water, cayenne pepper and honey, chicken and salad, fish and peas, water and oranges. It’s always some new craze, except juice detox. That’s never going to happen.

  A bang comes from upstairs and Claire pulls herself off the stool by the heavy marble worktop with a long, guttural sigh.

  “How is he? Any better?” I raise my eyes to the white drywall ceiling to enquire about her man-flu victim of a husband upstairs. She rolls her sea-green eyes.

  “God, Courtney, he’s absolutely wrecking my head. You’d swear he had the worst flu since swine flu mated with the Zika virus. I’m up and down those stairs like a yo-yo. It’s times like these I’m glad we don’t have kids, otherwise every day would be like this!” She winks at me. There is no reason why Martin and Claire don’t have children other than the fact that Martin did not want children in his life. When Claire told me this very matter-of-factly one night in the early days over my home-made margherita pizza, I was immediately alarmed. Not because Martin didn’t want children, that was totally Martin’s decision, but because Claire had often talked about kids and she seemed to be putting on a brave front of sorts. We had been in my kitchen in Dun Laoghaire not long after I moved in with David, the Christmas before both of our weddings.

  “You seriously make the most incredible pizza ever!” Claire had said as she pulled at the slice in her hand, the stringy cheese coming with her. “You are feeding my addiction! If pizza was a man I’d be having an affair!” she’d muttered through her full mouth, her then long red hair tied in a side ponytail.

  “I think I have finally mastered the perfect pizza. It’s getting the thin base just right so it doesn’t crumble in your mouth and remains firm, with a bite to it. I use a really good-quality olive oil and a little over the recommended two hundred millilitres of warm water.”

  I’d sprinkled more freshly grated Parmesan over the top as she casually said, “So, Martin and I have finally agreed that children are not on the cards for us.” She’d looked down at her phone and used her wetted finger to pick up loose shavings of cheese, avoiding my eye.

  “Oh . . . oh. Can I ask why?” I’d held the grated Parmesan bowl steady in my hand.

  “It’s just what we both want. I’m going to get the coil fitted before the wedding.” She’d lifted her wine glass, swirled the red liquid and taken a long drink.

  “Right.” I’d put the Parmesan back in the middle of the table.

  “We just think that we can do more things you know? Martin really wants to travel . . . He wants to see India, and the world, really.” She’d removed a cherry tomato from the pizza and popped it into her mouth.

  “Can’t you have children and travel too?” I’d gently probed while pretending to busy myself uncorking a bottle of red.

  “No . . . no . . . Because you see, we need to be able to live freely, go wherever we want at the drop of a hat. We do not want to be tied down.”

  I hadn’t liked how her voice had sounded. It wasn’t like her normal voice. It was rehearsed. But I hadn’t questioned their joint decision any further, and it’s something that has nagged at me ever since. Troubled me. I’m not sure why I said nothing else. I just got a feeling that was the way she wanted it. She was telling me, not asking me. Her mind was made up.

  I won’t lie, it puzzled me no end in the early days, especially after we all got married, when I was a self-confessed how-can-I-get-pregnant-quicker Nazi. Claire would listen to me talk about ovulation sticks and seemed slightly distant. When the four of us would go for a “fun” night out, I’d only drink bottled water because I was trying to get pregnant, and she’d tell me to live a little. When I wouldn’t eat any of Claire’s baking as I was off dairy – one of those old wives’ tales said it aided fertility – she’d say, “This is why I do not want to have a baby.” When I was obsessed with getting more vitamin B into my body and lived only on dull, dark leafy vegetables, she’d be eating chocolate donuts and lasagnes and white crusty rolls filled with hot chicken and butter. I was a bona fide pain in the arse. Sometimes I’d look at Claire and wonder how on earth she didn’t want to be a mother. I couldn’t for the life of me understand that about her. The want and physical need inside me was that strong. Looking back, it doesn’t seem so hard to understand how watching me would put any woman off ever wanting to get pregnant. I wasn’t much fun to be around. And especially now that I am the very proud owner of a moody, stroppy, sullen soon-to-be sixteen-year-old daughter, most days I get it. Kids are hard work, worth every ounce of labour, and everything thereafter, and I adore and worship the very ground my daughter walks upon, but still and all, hard bloody work.

  “It’s the second time this month he’s been taken down with it. I told him to get the flu jab in school, but he laughed at me. You know, Martin, Mr Health and Fitness. He is sorry now. He just seems to be picking up every virus going around in that school.” Claire pulls me back as she rests her hand on the slim gold handle of the kitchen door.

  “He needs to boost up his immune system. Is he taking Vitamin C and zinc?” I ask.

  “Martin? Martin Carney taking a tablet? How long have you known my husband, Courtney?” Claire does a double take and checks a watch that isn’t on her wrist.

  “Will he still never go to see a doctor? He still never takes tablets?” I shake my head, astounded.

  “Never! Imagine, Martin has never been to the doctor in his whole life.” Claire lowers her voice slightly.

  “Not even as a kid?” I follow suit, lowering my voice, although I don’t know why.

  “Nope. Martin’s mum – Mrs Carney Senior, as she likes to refer to herself – used home remedies for everything. Sure, he has me making poultices and putting them on his head. Here we go, what does he want me to do now? Boil his jocks in whiskey and rub them over his face perhaps?” She opens the door with a creak. I burst out laughing, and before she leaves the kitchen she pulls a book off the red laminated cookbook shelf. She pretends to lick the book cover. Then she holds it out to me. It’s a biography of TV chef Jamie Oliver.

  “Get out, you lunatic!” I say, laughing at her as she slips the book neatly back into its place.

  The smell of cinnamon is making me hungry again. Maybe that why I’m Titanic Kate? A bit more meat on her bones back then. I run my hands down my thighs. Bit more meat on mine since the affair I know, that’s for sure, but I think I look the better for it. Most people who are victims of spousal affairs can’t eat, can’t sleep, write wonderful, tragic poetry, or so I hear. Not me. I ate like a horse, and slept like a lamb, having my big double bed all to myself. Purposely I lay across my bed instead of down it, just because I could. I watched box set after box set of my own glorious girly choosing. I felt free. The single me relished the independence I had. I cooked food that I loved but that David always hated, in abundance. Lamb, for example. I roasted lamb shoulders with rosemary and garlic. I fried up lamb and chickpea curries. I did spring lamb kebabs with sun-dried tomatoes, yellow peppers and red onions. At night I made leftover lamb and mozzarella hot toasties and ate them in bed. I did it all. I ate it all. I loved it all, though admittedly I’d say there are fewer lambs left in the country, I ate that many.

  By the way, to get back to Claire’s rather flattering comparison, I’m very happy to be compared to Kate Winslet. I think it’s the highest of compliments. I suppose I do have similar features. I have pale skin, large lips and big, wide, b
lue eyes with wavy, unruly long blonde hair. Unlike the Oscar winner, however, mine was a short-lived acting career. My want for the norm was, looking back, quite bizarre. I thought I’d never get up that aisle and get my legs up in those stirrups. Poor David never really stood a chance. My body had an overwhelming urge to procreate.

  No one really understands this primal need I had, I don’t think. It took over my body. That’s the only way I can explain it to you. It was a need like no other. An itch that I just couldn’t get relief from no matter how hard I scratched. It was common for me to approach strangers with new babies in the street and try to sniff them (the babies, not the strangers!). I was obsessed.

  Getting auditions was never a problem for me, but landing a job was. Possibly my Winsletty look was getting me through the door. I trod the boards in various theatres and had a part-time job with an events company, but I thought about having babies every single day. When I met David at a charity auction I was working at, and he told me over a bidding war on a Pro Golf lesson that he was single with a steady job and his own business, that was all I needed to know. Pathetic, right? I wholeheartedly agree. Courtney Downey the Venus flytrap. I was only twenty-two and very innocent for our times, probably because of how I was brought up, and it didn’t seem to matter that David and I had absolutely nothing in common.

  I lift Claire’s glass, my empty teacup, cutlery and my practically clean plate and take them over to the sink to wash. It’s odd, I guess, to most people that at the age of thirty-eight I have never been in love. Well, I am completely and utterly in love with Susan, that is true love, but you get what I mean. Never have I felt those fireworks shoot up my stomach or had my knees turn to jelly. Those proverbial fireworks are still waiting to explode. I would have said it’s all bullshit and that it doesn’t exist, except when I see Claire with Martin, and then I know it truly does exist. Claire is head over heels, shooting stars, jellied knees, and extravagantly, pyrotechnically in love with her husband.

  I really like Martin Carney. He’s one of the most personable people you could ever meet. His personality is larger than life. He commands a room or a dinner-party table. Educated, great-humoured and confident. I wouldn’t say we are very close friends, but we get on just fine. David used to say Martin was unreadable, but since the split Martin has always looked out for me and Susan. He will offer to do things for me around the house: things I think he considers are Man Things. I never take him up on the offers, as I can do all the Man Things myself, but I appreciate the thought. He is a careers guidance officer in the local secondary school and the kids absolutely adore him. Best advice-giver is whispered a lot on the grounds of St Jude’s. Martin always dresses to impress the students. He wears a uniform of a crisp white shirt, polka-dot dickie bows, colourful waistcoats and black trousers, and his black patent-leather shoes are always exceptionally shiny. Martin is as immaculate as his good wife.

  Claire comes back in, carrying a brown furry covered hot water bottle, a Father Ted-captioned cup and a blue bowl and crosses her kitchen to the sink beside me. “Just thinking there actually, Mrs Ex-Downey – please go back to your own name – I couldn’t be Martin’s friend if he ever left me, although Martin has a functioning brain, unlike ditzy David.” I take the items from her hands and she bends down and opens the oven, looks in and makes a few humming sounds. Again I smell cinnamon. And familiarity.

  “Another twenty minutes should do these, I think.” She closes the oven by flicking her foot and catching the half-open oven door with the heel of her flip-flop. Claire is dressed in a pair of loose three-quarter length khaki combats, a white flowing man’s dress shirt and the aforementioned flip-flops. Her cropped red hair requires no maintenance really, apart from a grip to keep her side fringe from falling over her left eye. She is make-up free, apart from her signature black-kohl cat’s-eye flick at the sides of her green eyes. She’s so striking. I never see her weight like she does. We stand side by side. Both exactly five feet six inches.

  “How is he, Nurse Carney?” I ask her hurriedly in an American accent, as one might ask a nurse in the ER. She grins as she watches me squeeze lemon-scented washing-up liquid into the sink. She turns the tap on for me and leans against the worktop, facing me. Claire has one of these jet-spray-type taps I still cannot work without drenching the whole area. I swirl it to whip up some bubbles. She whips out the magic blue cloth and mops up my mess. Not answering me, she appears to be deep in concentrated thought. I repeat my question.

  “How is he, Nurse Carney?”

  “He’s a bit out of it actually . . . odd . . . like the fever still has a hold, but he refuses to take any paracetamol so he’s just going to have to suffer and sweat it out of himself. But I’ve never seen him so subdued. He said his head is literally pumping off his shoulders, so I guess that’s why.” She looks me in the eye, and now she seems happy that she has worked out why Martin is acting so strangely, so she continues, a little more humour now in her voice.

  “Current demands are simple: flat 7UP and another hot water bottle, although he’s already on fire. No request for boiled jocks in whiskey, I am happy to report. I’m going to change the sheets when you head off to the shops, they are soaking wet. Get him to have a cool wash.” She turns back to the complicated running tap and expertly turns it off. We both mull this over as I wash the dishes, leaving them to drip dry on her two-tier dish rack and we return to sit at the island in the centre of her kitchen.

  This Sunday afternoon pretty much sums up my life right now. Susan spends the weekends with her dad, so I relax at Claire and Martin’s, sampling her cakes and giving my humble culinary opinions while she makes notes. Occasionally, like today, we slag off David and Mar-nee. I know it’s not very nice, but it is a distraction from the decision I have to make by the end of the month. The decision that is hanging over my every waking moment. Today is the sixteenth of May. The aforementioned decision needs to be made, and on my boss Lar Kilroy’s desk by ten o’clock on the thirty-first of May. It’s the offer of a lifetime where my career is concerned and I’ve worked really hard for it, but my life isn’t only mine. I have a precious daughter to consider.

  To make matters worse there is a new girl in town, or in our office anyway: Yvonne Connolly, all bouncy black blow-out hair, blinding suits and chalk-white teeth, who also happens to be brilliant at her job. I should know: I trained her. Never expected she would be so good so soon. She is just waiting for me to turn this job down and her name is all over it. I’ve worked too hard to let that happen but I have to listen to my daughter too, don’t I? At the end of the day, I’m a mother first and foremost. But I really want it. For the first time in years, I’m actually excited about something for me.

  2

  After my banoffee-and-bitching session with Claire, and with my well-worked-out-to-the-rounded-cent, budgeted weekly shopping crammed into the boot of my tiny white Peugeot, I take a leisurely drive home. These days I have to go compare. I buy milk and bread in one supermarket, my meat and chicken in another, and my cleaning products in yet another. It will be five o’clock before David drops Susan home. David’s timekeeping now that he’s with Mar-nee is perfection. She has made several positive David improvements, I have to give her that much.

  David was actually late for his own wedding. I’d had to circle the church five times waiting for him to turn up. Granny Alice had grunted and gritted her teeth beside me in the bridal car, holding my clammy hand tightly in hers. Uncle Tom had cruelly laughed in the front, saying, “Knew that fella was a complete knob. Looks like yer still on the shelf, Courtney.” Eventually David turned up, oblivious to the small panic he had created. He’d been watching the Masters by all accounts and lost track of time. Go figure.

  Claire and Martin’s house overlooks the sea on Sandymount Strand so I take the coastal route home to my house in Dun Laoghaire. As I drive I allow my mind to drift slightly. I try to organise my weekly schedule in my head, but as always my mind floats straight to my pubescent daughter, Susan. T
he reason Claire did not want to discuss Susan today is that mother and daughter are going through a real rough patch. Dangerous ground is being trod upon. Susan is no longer overly fond of me, her mammy, or, as she calls me in her American accent, her mom. These days I am sworn enemy number one and I do not like this phase in our relationship. I do not like it one bit. Obviously all I want is for her to be happy, but I honestly don’t know if she is or not. There is so little connection and communication between us right now. We used to have a brilliant relationship before the spilt. But now I’m constantly on her back, according to her, and it’s true. I am. If you see her Snapchats, you will see me literally behind her back, sneaking up on her, despairing of her every move being Snapchatted to God knows who. Nothing in my house is private. Every inch of it has been Snapchatted to the world, from my toilet to my messy wardrobe. It’s almost like Susan can’t live without telling people she is living.

  Walking into the kitchen. “I’m walking into the kitchen.”

  Opening the fridge door. “No nice food in the fridge again.”

  Standing in the middle of the kitchen. “Kitchen floor needs mopping.”

  In the back garden. “Mom’s empty wine bottles need the bottle bank.”

  Opening the press. “Down to the last teabag.”

  Dull. Dull. Dull. I cannot see the point in it. Susan lives in a world of social media. It consumes her life. Her every waking moment. The world’s top surgeons couldn’t remove that iPhone from her hand if they tried. It is now an extension of her arm. Honestly, it riles me every time I try to talk to her and it keeps beeping and beeping and beeping and beeping and beeping some more and I don’t know why I get so utterly mad. Yes, it is 2017, it’s what they all do. I know that.