Someone Like You

‘Great Aunt Petra isn’t coming, is she?’ groaned Kirsten, looking at Emma’s rough table plan for their mother’s birthday dinner.

‘Of course she is,’ Emma said, emerging from basting the goose again, her face puce with heat and exertion. ‘She’s Dad’s only living aunt and he’d go mental if she wasn’t invited.’

‘She’s an unhinged bitch and everybody hates her,’ protested Kirsten. ‘If Dad wants to invite her to their bloody house, that’s his business. I don’t know why the rest of us have to put up with her.’

‘Yeah,’ snapped Emma, fed up with the lack of catering help Kirsten had provided since she’d arrived an hour previously with her hair newly blow-dried and no obvious intention of doing anything useful. ‘And who’d have to put up with the full-scale row there’d be if she wasn’t here? Me, that’s who. I’d never hear the end of it.’

‘Emma, would you listen to yourself? You’re an adult, this is your house and you can invite who you bloody want to. Let Dad throw a tantrum if he wants. Ignore him. I do.’ Kirsten ran a lilac fingernail down the list. ‘Monica and Timmy Maguire! Ugh, he’ll get poor Patrick in a corner and ask him what he should do with his shares, as usual. I told Patrick to ask for a fee next time.’

‘You’re bloody great at telling people what to do,’ hissed Emma, finally having had enough. She was hot, sweaty, tired and fed up with Kirsten. ‘Did you come here to help or to simply point out what an inadequate human being I am?’

Kirsten refused to be riled. ‘Keep your hair on, Sis,’ she answered. ‘You’re only pissed off because you know I’m right. If you don’t stand up to Dad some day, you may as well move back home – because you’re totally under his thumb as it is.’

Emma felt her anger deflate like a pricked balloon. Her eyes filled with tears. The goose wasn’t half-cooked, the guests were rolling up in an hour and Pete, who’d promised to be home early, was stuck with a client in Maynooth and wouldn’t be back until at least seven.

‘It’s easy for you,’ she told Kirsten, feeling hot, angry tears flooding down her face. ‘You’ve always been their pet. You could tell Dad to fuck off and he’d smile indulgently at you. But he hates me; I can never do anything right for him. All I want is some respect – it’s not too much to ask, is it?’ She tried to rub away the tears but they kept coming.

If fury had no effect on Kirsten, neither did weeping, which was why she so successfully dealt with her father’s machinations.

‘He doesn’t hate you, Sis,’ she said calmly, ignoring Emma’s tears. ‘He’s a bully and you’ve let yourself be his own personal punchbag. I can’t help you and neither can Pete. You’re on your own. Jesus, Emma, if you can run that bloody office, then you can certainly deal with Dad, can’t you? Now, what do you want me to do next? You better go upstairs and make yourself presentable or Petra the Gorgon will have a few choice insults to fling at you about how you’re letting yourself go now that you’re married.’

If the birthday dinner proved anything, it proved that their fears about their mother were unfounded. Anne-Marie sailed into the house with her husband in tow, face wreathed in smiles and new earrings to be admired. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ she said coquettishly, pulling back a strand of long, pale gold hair, which flowed loosely around her shoulders. ‘They’re from your father.’ She kissed Kirsten happily.

‘Darling Kirsten, I don’t know what was wrong with me the other day, I found that lovely voucher you gave me for Christmas. I know it’s bad of me, but I completely forgot about it and now it’s out of date, but it was a lovely thought. I couldn’t see anything with those old glasses, but look –’ she produced new glasses with snazzy gold frames – ‘I’ve got new ones and reading is no problem any more. Hello, Emma love, there’s a nice smell coming from the kitchen. I hope it’s not goose; you know Auntie Petra says it gives her indigestion ever since we had it at her Roland’s christening back in 1957.’

Emma and Kirsten shared a conspiratorial grin. ‘All the more reason for cooking goose, eh?’ whispered Kirsten.

Emma nodded with relief. Her mother was perfectly all right. It was obvious there was nothing wrong with her mind. Nobody who could remember the ill-effects of a goose at a christening in 1957 could possibly have anything wrong with their brain.

Half an hour later, all the guests were there, wandering around the house and chatting. Emma was standing in the kitchen beside the dining-room door, hurriedly ironing the napkins she’d just removed from the drier. Her mother would have had a fit if she’d produced paper ones.

‘It’s a lovely dining room,’ she heard Monica Maguire say. ‘I like these pictures,’ she added, obviously admiring the Paul Klee prints Emma loved.

‘Well, it’s not to my taste,’ Emma overheard her father say gruffly. ‘Still, what can you say. I mean, myself and Anne-Marie gave them the deposit money for it and we’d have liked to have helped them with decorating advice, but you know youngsters, ungrateful.’

Emma stood behind the door into the dining room and felt cold rage flood through her. How dare he tell people he’d given them the deposit money for the house! How dare he! That was their private life. And he hadn’t given it to them, anyway. She and Pete had insisted on treating it as a loan and were paying money into her parents’ account every month. But to casually tell a neighbour about it, as if she and Pete were kids or freeloaders who used and abused…That was terrible, awful. A fierce rage for her father burned in her peaceful soul. God she hated that man!

CHAPTER NINE

Leonie was not thrilled with herself. Despite spending many arm-aching hours painting, the kitchen did not look the way she wanted it to. The plan had been simple: inspired by endless television make-overs, Leonie had convinced herself that she too could turn a small cottage kitchen into an exotic Egyptian-inspired room with the aid of midnight blue paint, some artistic stencilling and a can of metallic spray paint. Unfortunately, what looked easy in half an hour on the telly with scores of helpers, expert carpenters, an interior designer and an entire TV crew ready to help out if necessary, wasn’t easy in real life. After three evenings and her entire Sunday spent knee-deep in old newspapers with the animals sulking in another room, the kitchen looked desperate. Two of the walls were a frighteningly dark midnight blue with silver stars supposedly reflecting the silver of the knobs she’d bought for the cupboards. The cupboards themselves had been painted primrose to go with both the freshly painted woodwork and the other two walls, but instead of gliding on to the carefully prepared surfaces, the paint had dried in myriad globules so it looked as if the doors had developed smallpox.

Her idea of having stars on the ceiling had been lovely and very celestial, but midnight blue everywhere had made the room – small and, luckily, south-facing – a bit gloomy. So she’d wearily repainted two walls. It took three coats of primrose to cover the blue.

Meanwhile, the stencilled border, which the stencil book she’d borrowed from the library described as ‘an Egyptian-inspired motif of birds and animals’, resembled something inexpert four-year-olds might daub on their first day at school in between peeing in their seats and sobbing for their mummies.

‘It’s a bit ambitious, Leonie,’ her mother had remarked kindly when she arrived that afternoon with some flowers from her garden and home-made tea brack to celebrate the children’s return.

‘I like it better today,’ Claire said, finding a vase for the off-white roses and putting the kettle on to boil at the same time. ‘It was too dark when it was all blue.’

‘I know.’ Covered with paint and exhausted after forty-eight hours of decorating, Leonie was shattered. Her black leggings were like a Rorschach blot of primrose and blue paint, and Danny’s old grey sweatshirt wasn’t much better. Every inch of her hands was crusty with emulsion and she needed an hour in the bath at least.

‘What have you been up to all day, Mum?’ Leonie asked, reaching under the table to pet Penny’s silky ears. Penny, who’d been largely ignored during the painting, hummed in bliss.

‘I worked on Mrs Byrne’s daughter’s wedding dress for hours. The pair of them should be strung up. Every time I do something, she changes her mind and I have to rip it. Mrs Byrne insists on hanging around while I sew and the cats keep winding themselves round her legs so she’s permanently covered with fluff. I’m going to run out of Sello-tape getting cat fur off her dress.’ Leonie’s mother had been a seamstress and, on retirement, had started her own dressmaking business. She was very good, and her tiny Bray front room was permanently full of hopeful clients wanting a debs dress or wedding outfit knocked up for half-nothing.

Claire took out her cigarettes and lit up. ‘I stopped at five and came down here for a break. Will I make us some tea, or are you rushing?’

‘You stopped at five o’clock?’ Leonie shot up in her seat as the words sank in. ‘What time is it now? I’ve taken my watch off so it wouldn’t get covered with gloss and I thought it was only three at the latest.’

‘It’s half five.’

‘Oh, Mother of God, the kids are coming home in an hour,’ wailed Leonie. ‘I’ll never change and make it to the airport on time.’

‘Well, I did think you were being very relaxed about getting to the airport. Sure, what do you want to change for? Just go like that,’ said her mother sensibly.

‘I wanted to look lovely for them coming home,’ Leonie said, rooting around under newspapers for her keys. ‘I wanted the house to look lovely too…’

‘They’ll be so pleased to see you, they won’t mind a bit of paint. I’ll rustle up some supper for you all, shall I?’

Tired from the transatlantic flight, the trio emerged half an hour late behind a trolley jammed with plastic bags, rucksacks and bulging suitcases. Mel and Abby were fashionably pale, thanks to many teen magazine articles warning of skin cancer. Danny, on the other hand, was mahogany. All three wore new clothes which made Leonie instantly guilty: their father had obviously decided they were dressed like ragamuffins and had kitted them out from head to toe in new gear. She was a bad, spendthrift mother for frittering away money on a holiday when the kids needed new stuff. The knowledge that at least three-quarters of her clothes came from second-hand shops remained firmly at the back of her mind.

Mothers were supposed to dress in desperate, cast-off rags as long as their offspring had the newest designer clothes and whatever variety of trainers Nike were advertising twenty-four hours a day on MTV.

‘You’ll never guess,’ squealed Mel excitedly as soon as the new clothes had been admired and they were in the car, rattling along the motorway.

‘Yeah, Mel’s got herself a boyfriend,’ interrupted Danny.

‘Have not!’ shrieked Mel.

‘Yes you have,’ Danny said, sounding less like a nineteen-year-old and more like his fourteen-year-old twin sisters. Well, more like Mel. Not Abby. Abby was so grown up she wasn’t fourteen – she was going on forty.

‘Haven’t! And that wasn’t what I was going to say!’ roared Mel.

‘Stop it,’ said Leonie, wishing they’d waited at least until they were a mile away from the airport before the inevitable row. Danny and Mel sparked off each other like pieces of flint. Every conversation between them turned into an argument. It was because they were so alike. Abby was thoughtful and grave, like her father. Her siblings were the complete opposite.

Mel’s favourite sentence when she’d been four was, ‘I want Danny’s…’ Danny’s dinner, Danny’s drink, Danny’s toys. If it was his, she wanted it. And he, at the wise old age of nine, had been just as bad. Mel’s favourite cuddly toy – without which she refused to go to sleep – had been hidden with Danny’s Action Man collection for three whole murderous, sleepless nights before Leonie found it when she was hoovering.

The current argument subsided purely because Danny decided to play with his new Discman and stuck his earphones in with a bored shrug that said, ‘Women, huh!’ Leonie shuddered to imagine what a Discman cost. Hundreds of dollars, no doubt. Ray must be making a mint.

‘Will I tell her?’ Abby whispered to Mel.

‘Yes.’ Mel was sulking now. She stared out of the window with her pointed little face in a sulky pout. The beauty of the family, Mel could even sulk prettily. With her father’s big dark eyes, delicately arched eyebrows, translucent skin and full lips, she looked like a teenage catwalk model trying to look moody for a photo shoot.

‘Tell me what?’ asked Leonie, fascinated and dying to hear every bit of their news.

‘It’s Dad…’ Abby began slowly.

Mel couldn’t bear it. She had to interrupt: ‘He’s getting married,’ she cried. ‘To Fliss! She’s gorgeous, she can ski, and we’re all invited to Colorado with them – and for the wedding too. She’s going to get us dresses made. I want a short one with high boots –’

She shut up at a quick poke in the ribs from her twin.

‘I know it sounds a bit sudden, Mum,’ said Abby delicately, wise beyond her years and knowing the news might be hard for her mother to take.

Sudden, thought Leonie, struggling to keep her eyes focused on the road. Sudden wasn’t the word. Ray was getting married again. She could barely take it in. She was here with nobody and no romantic prospects while he, the one she thought would flounder because he was so quiet, so introspective, so broken-hearted when they’d split up ten years previously, was in love and getting married.

A lump swelled in her throat and she was glad that it was Danny in the front of the car with her, unobservant Danny who was locked into his Discman and some thumping ambient beat. Watchful Abby would have noticed her mother’s eyes filling with tears right away.

‘Well,’ she managed to say, the words nearly sticking in her throat, ‘that’s great. When is the big day?’

‘January,’ said Mel wistfully, already imagining herself in groin-level flimsy silk, her long legs in knee-high boots giving middle-aged men heart attacks. ‘Fliss’s family have a cabin in Colorado and they’re going to have a winter wedding in the snow. Imagine! Us skiing. That’ll teach snotty Dervla Malone to boast about her holidays. Stupid cow thinks going to France is posh! Huh. She can kiss my ass.’

‘Melanie!’ Leonie narrowly avoided a daredevil bus driver and shot her daughter a fierce glare in the rear-view mirror. ‘If that’s the sort of language you’ve picked up on your holidays, you won’t be going anywhere. We don’t swear in our house.’

Mel flicked back her straight dark brown hair insouciantly, crinkling up her perfect little nose as she did so. ‘Lighten up,’ she muttered under her breath.

‘I heard that,’ Leonie replied tightly.

‘Aw, Mom,’ pleaded Mel, deciding to be conciliatory in case she wasn’t allowed to go to the wedding. ‘Sorry. But that’s not bad language. In Boston, people say that all the time. I mean, everyone in Ireland says “fuck” every five minutes. All Dad’s friends say so. They think we say “super-fucking-market”.’

‘Mel!’ hissed Abby.

‘We do not say that word all the time, and I don’t want to hear you say it either, got it?’ Leonie snapped, wondering why the Von Trapp family reunion wasn’t working out the way she had planned. So much for giant hugs and tearful murmurings of: ‘Mum, we missed you so much, we’ll never go away again.’

One child had become an American overnight and couldn’t wait to get back there to see her father’s fiancée, another was immersed in music and had refused to be hugged. Only dear sweet Abby seemed vaguely pleased to be home.

‘Tell me about this gorgeous fella you’re not going out with,’ Leonie requested in an attempt to get the conversation back on an even keel.

Both girls giggled. ‘Brad is his name,’ explained Abby eagerly. ‘He’s sixteen, tall, with naturally blond hair and he drives a jeep. He was nuts about Mel. He brought us both for a pizza.’

‘Brad, mm,’ said Leonie with a fake smile, her mind doing cartwheels. A sixteen-year-old with his own transport going out with her little girl! Melanie was only fourteen – a very knowing fourteen it had to be said, but still fourteen for all that. What the hell was Ray thinking of! She could have been assaulted, raped, anything!

‘His parents are Dad’s friends, and we weren’t out long,’ Abby added. ‘Dad said he’d murder Brad if we were gone more than an hour and a half, and the pizza place is just down the street.’

‘I wasn’t that interested,’ Mel said airily. ‘He’s too immature for me.’

‘He wasn’t,’ protested Abby and, with a catch in her voice, added, ‘he was lovely.’

I wished he’d fancied me instead of Mel, were the unspoken words.

Leonie’s heart ached for her much-loved daughter, the one who looked just like her. Abby had none of her twin’s effortless prettiness. Abby was as tall as Mel but stocky, with a solid body, mousy brown hair like Leonie’s before she got at it with the bleach, and a round, pleasant face that was only enlivened by her mother’s startling blue eyes. She was a steady, reliable estate car to Melanie’s sleek, capricious Ferrari, and she knew it.

Leonie adored her and saw such beauty and strength of character in Abby’s kind, loving face. But fourteen-year-old girls didn’t want strength of character: they wanted to look like drop-dead gorgeous movie stars and have teenage boys falling at their feet like flies. Mel did, Abby didn’t. And there was nothing their mother could do to even matters up.

At home, the girls rushed out of the car, eager to see their beloved Penny, Clover the cat and Herman.

‘Penny,’ they squealed in unison as their grandmother opened the front door and Penny sprang out like a caged tiger, hysterical with delight. A huge group hug ensued, with everyone trying to cuddle Penny and have it proved that they were her favourite and had been missed the most. With typical feline indifference, Clover refused to have any truck with cuddles, flicked her tail sharply in disapproval and shot off into the garden.

‘She’s affected by the paint fumes,’ muttered Leonie’s mother wickedly.

Luggage was dropped carelessly in the hall, waiting for Leonie to haul it to the various bedrooms.

‘Mom!’ said Mel, aghast, on entering the kitchen which had been magnolia the last time she’d seen it. ‘What have you been doing?’

‘Having an orgy with Francis Bacon,’ laughed Danny, coming up behind his sister and staring at the brightly coloured disaster area which his grandmother had failed to tidy up completely. ‘Were you helping, Gran?’

‘No, and don’t tease your poor mother. She’s been trying to brighten this place up,’ she said sternly, heading to the cooker where a chicken stew was bubbling appetizingly. ‘Your mother needs a hand to tidy up.’

‘I’ve got people to phone,’ said Mel, backing out of the room rapidly at the notion of ruining her nails cleaning up all that horrible newsprint and emulsion. Fliss had given her a French manicure before they’d left for Logan Airport. Domestic work would ruin the effect and she wanted her hands perfect for the next day when she’d pay a visit to her arch enemy and supposed friend, Dervla Malone.

‘Me too.’ Danny was gone like a shot, leaving Abby, her mother, grandmother and a still joyous Penny amid the endless paint-splattered newspapers and cans of paint.

‘I’ll help, Mum,’ said Abby loyally.

‘No, love, we’ll eat in the living room,’ Leonie decided, looking dismally at the chaos and deciding that she couldn’t face a proper clean up. She’d bag all the newspaper and that would be it for the moment. ‘Thanks for cooking,’ she added, giving her mother a peck on the cheek.

They ate on their knees in the living room with the TV on while Danny controlled the remote and flicked from channel to channel in between wolfing down chicken and rice.

Green, thought Leonie, looking around the small but cosy room with its apple-green walls and profusion of plants. Green was the colour she should have painted the kitchen. Not horrible midnight blue. If they could cope with blue for a week, she’d re-do it all next weekend. Maybe a paler green…

Mel’s words intruded into her brain, dragging her away from paint.

‘…Fliss is really nice,’ Mel was whispering to her grandmother, who was nodding wisely and trying not to look at her daughter.

Leonie felt her face burn, knowing her mother pitied her and hating it. Claire had loved Ray and had been heartbroken when they’d got a divorce. ‘There aren’t as many fish in the sea when you’re actively looking, Leonie,’ she had said gently at the time. ‘You love each other: can’t you get on with it and stop looking for true love? I’m so afraid you’ll regret this.’

Ten years on, she’d been proved right, Leonie thought bitterly. Ray had had several long-term girlfriends while she, the great believer in true love, had had so few dates that flirting with the postman was her idea of romantic excitement. And he was past sixty and grizzled looking.

She pretended to concentrate on the sitcom Danny was watching and surreptitiously listened to Mel telling her grandmother all about the holiday.

‘Dad’s house is lovely but not big enough for us, Gran, although it had en suites everywhere,’ said the girl who’d been raised in a succession of small homes and now lived in a cottage with one bathroom and a constant queue for it.

‘Fliss wants to convert one bedroom into a dressing room for herself. She has so many clothes!’

Yeah, snarled Leonie to herself. Probably all band-aid skirts and second-skin leather things. She imagined a cheerleader type, shimmering blonde hair and teeth that had never eaten too many sugar-laden Curly Wurlys as a child. Or maybe she was a hard-bitten businesswoman, another lawyer, all power suits like someone from LA Law. Suddenly Leonie stopped, horrified at herself. What was wrong with her, she wondered blindly. She’d wanted to leave Ray, she’d started the whole agonizing process of separation and divorce – so why was she now jealous of this gorgeous Fliss? He was entitled to another life; she’d practically pushed him into it, hadn’t she?

What sort of person was she turning into if she begrudged Ray a little happiness? A bitch, that’s what. A cast-iron bitch.

Abby was eating very little of her dinner. She normally wolfed it down, eating far more quickly than her twin who nibbled daintily. Now, Abby pushed bits of chicken listlessly around her plate. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ Leonie asked in concern, staring across the coffee table to where Abby sat beside her grandmother on the sofa-bed.

Abby smiled brightly. ‘Fine, Mum, fine,’ she replied. ‘I’m just not hungry.’

‘That’d be a first,’ guffawed Danny.

Abby’s eyes glistened but she said nothing.

Leonie gave her an encouraging grin and vowed to kill Danny when she got him alone. He wouldn’t know how to spell ‘thoughtfulness’, never mind know what it meant. Abby silently took the plates out to the kitchen while Mel rummaged around in a very trendy vinyl handbag Leonie had never seen before. More holiday goodies from a doting father.

‘The holiday snaps,’ Mel announced happily, finding a huge wad of photo envelopes. ‘I can’t wait any longer to show them to you, Mum.’

Leonie cranked her jaw into a steely smile and hoped she could fake a bit of pleasure at the sight of the beautiful Fliss.

Leonie, Claire and Mel squashed up together on the two-seater to view the precious pictures. The first batch of photos were typically Mel – ones where people had their heads chopped off or shots of the glamorous shops in Boston where the reflection from the glass meant you couldn’t see anything.

‘I don’t know how they didn’t work out so well,’ Mel said in consternation as they all tried to figure out who was who in one particularly blurry picture.

The next batch was better.

‘I took them,’ Danny said loftily from his position as king of the remote control.