The Importance of Being Me Read online

  “It’s two zero one seven, Courtney, it’s what they all do,” David tells me all the time when I call him to complain and ask him to talk to her. I ask him whether we’re monitoring it closely enough. Just because it’s what they all do, does that make it right? How safe is it all really?

  “Chillax. It’s just a bit of harmless fun,” is his repetitive answer. I don’t think David had ever heard the word “chillax” until he met Mar-nee Maguire. Now he uses it in almost every sentence to me, and we have to talk a lot. You see, we never went to court, David and me. I know. I might live to regret that decision. We just decided it was best for Susan if we could manage our affairs in private and slip easily into our new lives with as little upheaval as possible, so we agreed to co-parent. Thankfully the break-up was all very quiet and low-key, as we had Susan’s best interests at heart the whole way through. The night we told her was horrendous, though.

  As the traffic lights turn amber, I brake slowly, press the clutch, wiggle the gear stick to be sure I’m in neutral, and pull up the handbrake. An older couple pushing a double buggy wisely make sure I’ve fully stopped before they trust the green man. They both look exhausted. I think back.

  We were sitting down to dinner in our kitchen and every bite stuck in my throat. I’d made our family Friday-night favourite on a Monday. My much-loved grilled chicken breast, sweet garden pea, red onion and wild mushroom risotto with Avoca’s pink lemonade. “Second-helpings Friday” as David used to call it. Susan’s suspicions were immediately aroused as she stood by me, my eyes watering, chopping spring onions. Susan was fourteen but very clued in. She knew we were fighting about stuff and heard all the badly hushed conversations, but I was so careful to shield her as best I could. Occasionally she would say, “I know you and Dad hate each other, Mom.” I would tell her not to be so silly, that I certainly did not hate Dad at all. Eventually it was me who broke my little girl’s heart.

  “Susan, Daddy and I have decided we cannot be married to each other any more. Daddy is going to move out.” Harsh words, no sugar coating for her: just the truth. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t just blurt this out; I had been on every break-up advice website from Dublin to Toronto. Truth was the only way. Truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  “I fell in love with someone else, sweetheart, it’s not all Mammy’s fault,” David had stupidly spat out after we had absolutely decided not to tell her that bit. I’d gripped my glass so tight I’m amazed it didn’t shatter into a metaphor for our broken family life. Susan had just looked at us both. Her bright eyes were glazed, but she was composed. Her risotto was largely untouched.

  “Who did you fall in love with, Daddy?” she’d asked carefully. My heart had lurched into my throat.

  “A lovely lady called Mar-nee, beautiful, sweet, sweet Mar-nee Maguire, and I know you will really like her, sweetheart. I’m going to be staying with her, but she’s so lovely and she’d love to have you come stay too – she has a spare box room that just has salon supplies in it right now and says you can do it up as you wish. I thought the three of us could go to IKEA and—”

  I’d slammed my hands down on the table and immediately regretted it. The upside-down glass ketchup bottle had toppled over. I had been trying to get the sauce at the end of the bottle out. Susan had yelped.

  “Sorry . . . sorry. Please, David, now isn’t the right time to discuss Mar-nee. We need to talk about Susan and her feelings,” I’d implored.

  “Calm down, Courtney, eh? Chillax.” David had folded his arms defensively. The first “chillax” had been thrown my way. I had tried to compose myself beside this bloody idiot.

  “I am really calm, David, I just want us to focus on Susan and how she is feeling right now.” I’d grabbed a bobble on my wrist and tied my long hair up in a topknot for something to do with my hands. The kitchen clock had ticked so loudly all three of us looked up at it. The small hand counted down our last meal as a family. No one had eaten. No one had spoken until at last Susan pushed back her chair, scraping it off the tiled floor (normally a no-no), coughed and then said quietly, “It’s grand, whatevs . . . I knew anyway.” She had slid the screen of her iPhone across, illuminating her drawn face, then held the phone out at arm’s length and made a sad face into the screen.

  “So . . . Mom and Dad hate each other, Dad taking off.” She actually Snapchatted our breakup. They were our daughter’s final public words on the matter of her parents’ marital break-up and her father moving in with his new, younger girlfriend.

  Now, I push my foot down hard on the clutch and move into first, pressing the accelerator softly. When David had finally moved out, Susan had stood by his plumbing van sobbing and sobbing. The neighbours, taking for ever to put out their brown bins, watched it all. No doubt David had told them all our private business already. When he drove away I’d cuddled my shaking little girl, but something had changed in her. I’d felt it instantly. She seemed stiff, aloof, far away. I’d held her as tightly as I could and made soothing sounds and told her how much I loved her and said over and over again, “Everything is going to be all right, love.”

  “I’m going on the iPad in my room,” was all she had said back to me as she’d ducked out of my embrace, and she pretty much stayed in her room on that iPad for the next year and a half. For some bizarre reason, I felt that she blamed me.

  Our routine is that Susan stays with me during the week and David and Mar-nee at weekends. Holidays are shared out equally. The first Christmas was the hardest. Our first one as a broken unit. What we’d agreed was that David has her for Christmas Eve each year and Christmas Day Susan spends with me. But the problem is Susan wants to spend more time with her dad and Mar-nee. I’m not stupid – I know why. They are very lenient on her and the time she spends on the phone and iPad. David thinks social media is all fine and just a part of growing up nowadays. A bit of fun. Chillax, Courtney. But I don’t find it fun. Not one single bit. I don’t get a single laugh out of it. We used to laugh all the time, me and Susan, before the split. God knows who she’s laughing with now in her Snapchat world. We laughed so hard I have the lines to prove it. I’d slap my knee, throw my head back and freely guffaw with her.

  I relax my feet, look up and risk a wry smile in the rear-view mirror. Avert my eyes quickly. Crow’s Feet Winslet. Listen, I can be against Botox but I can still have a moan about ageing.

  Susan and I were so close. Like, ridiculously close. Cooking was something we did together every evening: she’d be my helper. When she was much smaller we would play cookery school. Susan would be the head chef and I played her commis chef. I was teaching her to cook and she was having so much fun, covered in flour and other messy ingredients. At weekends we went horse riding to a local school and we’d take the hacks around the area together. David worked Saturdays and Sundays on call-outs most of the time so I would drive her to parties or we’d go to Dundrum and browse the shops, sipping smoothies and enjoying one another’s company.

  When she hit thirteen, the change occurred. Perhaps a coincidence, I will never know, but it was just after David insisted we get her an iPhone for Christmas. Now we rarely do anything together, never mind laugh. Well, Mar-nee makes her laugh all the time, she tells me.

  I stare up into the mirror again, lick my index finger to wipe some running liquid eyeliner from under my ice-blue eyes. I used to be the person who Susan said saw the good in everything and was so lovely. Courtney Downey, her mum, her glass was always half full. Courtney Downey, her mum, she’s great craic. Courtney Downey, her mum, always up for a laugh. “Mum, I love the way we are best friends!” She’d hug me closely.

  “Mothers aren’t supposed to be best friends with their daughters,” Claire used to say, and I used to disagree with her.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, because you need to point out all the shit they are doing wrong . . . No one wants a BFF like that,” she’d answered truthfully.

  “I do that too!” I’d argued.

  “Y
ou don’t, Courtney . . . You never tell Susan anything negative.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I had got stroppy and defensive.

  “I’m not meaning anything . . . I’m just saying if you treat her as a best friend, she has no boundaries, right?”

  I ponder this old conversation now as I turn to look at the calm summer evening tide. Holding the button down on my electric window, I inhale the seaweed and salted air. I’m sure Claire was right, of course. What I hate most of all now is I’m so regularly angry with Susan. It’s just not me. That’s not the type of person I am. Sometimes when I am deep in an argument with her I don’t understand who I have become. I’m not someone I like. I forget to be grateful for all the blessings I have. Her. Our health. My job. Having my only other blood relative, my maternal grandmother, Alice, still with me on this big green earth.

  Slipping the car into fourth gear, I drive on up the free open road. The truth hurts me deeper than I let myself feel. That truth is that for the last year Susan has preferred Mar-nee to me. Pathetic to think, pathetic to admit, but it cuts like a knife.

  “She just gets me, Mom, she’s just more on my wavelength,” Susan had almost shouted at me only last night when I asked her to put down the phone and stop FaceTiming Mar-nee and get into bed. She’d corrected me and told me they were Snapchatting before she threw the phone onto her cluttered dressing table and then asked again to spend one night mid-week in Mar-nee’s luxury apartment. Purposely I’d ignored the request and asked her, “Where are Sophie and Emily? Why are you always talking to Mar-nee on that thing?” I was referring to the two girls on our road who still call for Susan though she seemed to have completely dropped them. I realised I sounded like a dinosaur when I referred to Snapchat as “that thing”.

  “They are so immature, Mom. Like, I never hang out with them any more. Plus Sophie doesn’t even have a Snapchat and Em’s mother is always watching every move she makes.” Susan shuddered.

  “Immature as they might be, they have been your friends since you were six years old!”

  “People move on, Mom.” Susan had dragged her dark ponytail from her bobble and run the pink Tangle Teezer through it.

  “People, not fifteen-year-old girls.” I had picked up five dirty glasses from her dressing table and stood at her door.

  “Sophie still goes horse riding with her mom and Emily just wants to walk around the estate all day looking for John Murphy from number six. John looks like such a loser on his skateboard, I can’t cope . . . literally!” She facepalmed herself.

  “I don’t think you are being very kind, Susan.” I’d clinked the dirty glasses off one another.

  “Maybe you just don’t get me, Mom.” She’d picked up a tub of some kind of expensive salon moisturiser and twisted the lid off.

  “Aren’t you a bit young to be using so many products on your skin?” I’d exclaimed.

  “It’s never too early to start looking after your skin, Mom! I mean, you really don’t take proper care of your skin. Like, Mar-nee can’t understand how you never tone?” She hadn’t meant to be hurtful, I know that. She must have seen the look on my face. “I-I-I-I-I mean you are super pretty, Mom. You have good skin . . . for your age . . . You know you could get rid of the bags under your eyes with Bag ’N’ Vanish – it’s the latest top-of-the-range eye-care machine Mar-nee has – and a little dab of Botox at the sides of your eyes. There’s a lot we could do with you!” She’d jumped off the bed and approached me. With her index fingers raised, she’d brought them up to the sides of my eyes and pulled back my skin. Looking really pleased with herself, she’d said, “There! See! Come look in the mirror, Mom.” She was delighted with herself. I, however, was offended and I simply couldn’t play along. I’d removed her hands slowly.

  “Thanks, Susan, but I’m happy to grow old gracefully,” I’d said, trying to keep the hurt out of my voice. I know she hadn’t meant to upset me.

  “Just so you know, no one else is!” She’d padded away in her bare feet.

  “I hope you aren’t ever considering messing with your beautiful face when you’re older?” My voice had gone an octave too high.

  “I’d do it now if I could. Kylie Jenner had her lips done at sixteen; Kris, that’s her mom, is so cool and she’s, like, absolutely ancient but looks shamazing,” Susan had informed me.

  “Kylie Jenner looks ridiculous,” I’d said, and meant it. The poor child. What will she look like in twenty years’ time?

  “Oh please!” She’d pulled back the yellow and white daisy-print duvet cover.

  “You really think she looks pretty?” I’d asked, bemused.

  “I think Kylie Jenner is the most beautiful girl in the world, Mom. Everyone does.” She’d slid under the covers, pulling the duvet up over her chin, and I wanted to cry.

  “Good night, Susan.” I’d flicked off the light, completely disheartened. All this image obsessiveness really worries me. Susan. Susan. Susan. My heart’s desire. The one true love of my life. My nine-pound, eight-ounce bundle of absolute joy. My swinging-pig-tailed, soother-sucking two-year-old. My clingy junior infant. My delightful Communion girl. My ten-year-old cooking buddy. My only child. Now, my moody soon-to-be sixteen-year-old. College not too far away. I can’t get her to go anywhere with me any more without a bribe, but Susan and Mar-nee go shopping together. I don’t know what age Mar-nee actually is, it’s hard to tell through the stretched skin and chemical desperation, but she actually dresses like Susan: green bomber jackets, denim shirts, dark leggings and Timberland boots.

  “Please, Mom . . . Before you go downstairs, please . . . You didn’t answer my question. Please let me crash at Mar-nee and Dad’s one night during the week?” she’d begged.

  “No. No way. It’s not on, Susan, you already spend every weekend there. That’s the deal. You live with me during the week. I’m not having this argument again, love.” I’d shut the door quietly behind me. I had tried to be understanding. Had tried to hide my hurt. Again.

  Turning the corner, I head towards our suburban house: 16 Clover Green Hill. It was actually left to David when his mother passed, so he already lived there mortgage-free when I met him. To be honest with you, it’s never really felt like my home. David very kindly lets Susan and I remain there: less disruption for her. I pay him some rent – a very small amount, it has to be said. He has to pay half of Mar-nee’s colossal luxury-apartment-complex mortgage since her tenant moved out to make way for him, so he gives us very little. He pays for Susan’s phone bill and the medical insurance and that’s about it. I can manage. I have a really good job. I don’t want anything from David other than for him to be a great dad to Susan. And he is, I have to give him that. No, he’s not a great disciplinarian, but he loves the very bones of that girl. Our agreement, the verbal one, is that Susan and I can stay there until Susan is eighteen and then we re-discuss the living arrangements. Claire is beyond maddened by this. She is always pointing out that I have no legal leg to stand on. Claire doesn’t trust David one iota any more.

  “So what if he and Mar-nee decide to have a baby and they want to move into Dun Laoghaire? For all we know, under all that botulinum toxin she could be twenty-five! Use your brain, Courtney!”

  But what can I do? Other affordable property options aren’t really waving me down in the street. I can’t afford to buy a house now, or ever, and it is Susan’s home. Granny Alice’s house in Inchicore is rented out by my uncle Tom to students to pay for her nursing home. Anyway, David would never kick us out. Planning has never been one of my greatest gifts, or saving for that matter.

  I don’t really remember my own family home. My parents both died within ten months of each other when I was six years old, and I only have one or two very vague memories. Playing on a makeshift tyre swing with a thick blue rope attached to the tree in the back garden, which my dad made for me, and my mam spooning chocolate sauce over my square-shaped ice cream. I remember how I had to wait for seconds before it hardened, then I’d crack
it with my spoon.

  My dad was killed in a motorbike accident on his way to work in the local garage and my mother, who had been ill for many years with MS, passed ten months later. My beloved maternal granny, Alice Bedford, took me in and gave me the most beguiling life. Alice’s only son, Tom, was a lot older and had married and moved out before I ever moved in. Alice and I lived very happily in her two-up two-down in Inchicore. She worked as a cook (no women were called chefs in those days) in Dublin in a small local café, Rosie’s. They did wholesome, old-fashioned foods for the building-site workers and the bus drivers around. Corned beef and cabbage. Ham and boiled potatoes and thick gravy. Hot meat sandwiches on thick cuts of white bread, saturated in real butter. Warm food. Filling food. But at home in our little haven in Inchicore, she made fabulous modern Italian cuisine, inspired by her mother’s heritage. Her secret recipe for seafood linguine was simply out of this world! Alice’s Seafood Surprise, she called it. Never would she let me peek at how it was made; instead, she’d make me taste and guess. It was a game I loved. I never got it exactly right, and to this day I still make that Seafood Surprise dish, but it never tastes as good as Alice’s. I’m still missing something, and now I’ll never know what that special ingredient was.

  She managed to make these dishes somehow. Woodcock’s, the local fishmonger, would sell her scraps at the end of the day as they were cleaning down, the ends of what fish hadn’t sold, and still she could make that masterpiece. Expensive cuts of meat were also hard to afford, but Granny could make the most mouth-watering pasta carbonara with the original recipe, which uses guanciale, or pig’s cheek. I would help her make home-made pasta. She would let me whisk together the flour and eggs as she stood over me, adding a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of olive oil. Her mauve padded housecoat, as she called it, protected her good clothes. Then I would cling-film our dough and while it sat for thirty minutes we’d put on old records and have a little dance. Although we had a television, we rarely put it on.