Marian Keyes - Watermelon (14 page)

The following day dawned bright cold and blustery.

I know this because I was awake at dawn.

It was a typical March day.

The rain had finally stopped.

But there's absolutely no symbolism in this fact. Let's face it, the bloody rain had to stop sometime.

After I had given Kate her bottle, I sat with her on the bed as I burped her. It was fast becoming clear to me that although I had been lucky enough to be dragged out of the mire of misery, this newfound liberation brought with it certain responsibilities.

Yesterday had been very nice. Really good fun.

But, and the thought came to me unbidden, there's more to life than having fun.

The little man in my head with the sandwich board, which normally says "The End Is Nigh," was today proclaiming "There's More to Life Than Having Fun."

He works for my Conscience Department.

I hate him.

The miserable bastard.

He's always showing up with his board and ruining things on me, espe- cially when I'm shopping, proclaiming weighty things like, "You Have Four Pairs of Boots Already" and "How Can You Justify Spending Twelve Pounds on a Lipstick."

He would completely ruin my shopping. Either I wouldn't

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buy the item in question. "I'm sorry," I would stammer as the assistant paused putting the shoes into the box and fixed me with a murderous stare. "I've changed my mind." Or else I would buy it but I'd feel so guilty about it that all the enjoyment would be gone.

Anyway, today the miserable old killjoy reminded me that I had to do a lot more with my life than hanging around a supermarket introducing Kate to boxes of frozen chocolate mousse. What kind of value system was I giving her?

Or making dinner for my family. Or getting odd little crushes on my sister's boyfriend.

I walked over to the window with Kate in my arms and we stood looking down at the garden that Michael so lovingly didn't tend. I was feeling a bit like a man who is just about to face a firing squad. It was time for me to face the music.

I had to address various horrible questions.

Involving money and custody of our child and the marital home.

And I swear to God it was so painful, my brain winced as I considered each subject.

This was the first time since I had watched James's back as he walked out of the hospital ward that I had looked at the practicalities of splitting up with him. Like, should James and I meet to consider selling our apart- ment? Should we divide our possessions equally between the two of us? That would be extremely amusing.

For example, would we drag our three-piece living room set out into the middle of the room and saw the couch in half, and take a piece each with all the foam and stuffing spilling out, plus a matching chair?

You know, that kind of thing.

I honestly didn't know how we were going to divide most of our posses- sions. Because they didn't belong to me and they didn't belong to James. They belonged to the elusive third party, "us." The person or energy, or whatever you want to call it, that was formed by the union of James and me. Which was much more than the sum of its parts.

How I wished I could find the missing "us." If only I could track it down and lure it back with offers of all these wonderful possessions. Like some awful third-rate game show host.

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See that lovely television.

It's yours. Now will you stay?

Have a look at the fine remodeled kitchen.

Beautiful, isn't it? Well, it can all be yours if only you'll come back.

Though I suppose you wouldn't get anything like a remodeled kitchen on a third-rate game show.

You'd be lucky to get your bus fare home.

But I wished that it could be as easy as that to get the James and Claire "us" back.

Or if all I had to do would be to put an announcement on the evening news that said something like "Would the James and Claire `us,' last known to be touring the [let's just say] Kerry area please contact the police in Dublin for an urgent message."

But it looked like the "us" wasn't just missing. It was dead. Killed by James.

And it died intestate.

In theory the state inherits all the possessions belonging to "us."

In practice, of course, nothing so surreal and ridiculous as that was going to happen.

Now pass me that saw, would you?

You see, I firmly believe that there was only one way to deal with unpleas- ant situations--and what was my current situation if not unpleasant? And that was to take a deep breath, face them fairly and squarely, look them in the eye, stare them down and show them who's boss.

I really believed very strongly in this.

And perhaps one day I might even take my own advice and actually do it.

To sum up my attitude, let me just tell you that I don't think I have ever, in my whole life, done the dishes on the actual night of a dinner party.

I always promised myself that I would. That waking up, with a hangover, to filthy plates and a kitchen that looked like a battleground was too horrible to contemplate. But you know what it's like.

The end of the evening has rolled around and the table is

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strewn with half-full dishes of melting baked Alaska, which I have more or less abandoned.

Now I must say, in my defense, that up to this point I am usually a model hostess, positively dancing attendance on my guests, ferrying plates and dishes and cutlery to and from the kitchen as though I was on a con- veyor belt. However, my sense of hospitality decreases in direct proportion to the number of glasses of wine that I've had, so by dessert and coffee time I am usually far too relaxed (all right then, far too drunk, if you will insist on calling a spade a spade) and no longer feel any need to clear the table. If the table had collapsed in front of me under the weight of the uncleared dishes, I would have just laughed.

If my guests wanted a clean table I'm afraid that they'd have had to do it themselves. They knew where the kitchen was. Were they waiting for an engraved invitation?

In the middle of the table there always was a completely untouched bowl of fruit.

I mean, what's the problem? Fruit is lovely.

I always bought fruit and no one ever ate it. Protestant dessert, Judy called it. My friends said that it was bad enough for me to insult them by offering them something like a banana or an orange for dessert. That their idea of a decent dessert--nay, their only idea of a dessert--was something positively bursting with saturated fats and refined sugar and double cream and alcohol and egg whites and cholesterol. The kind of dessert that your arteries con- tract an inch or two just from looking at. I was sure that they developed such attitudes in their deprived childhoods.

So the upshot was that I always bought fruit and my guests always never ate it. If you follow me.

And the view of the table was always obscured by about a thousand glasses, several of them overturned, with their contents, be it white wine, gin and tonic, Irish coffees or Baileys, fast spreading out and intermingling and making friends with each other on the tablecloth, forming little seas around the islands of salt, which some conscientious poor soul (usually James) had thrown down to halt the trail of devastation wreaked by the advancing hordes of spilled red wine.

And I would be on my twenty-second Sambucca and reclin-

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ing on the two back legs of my chair, or sitting on James's knee telling anyone who'd listen how much I love him.

I had no shame.

My sobriety was less than judgelike, but I was at one with the universe.

Every morning after a party I staggered down to the kitchen and for a second I paused with my hand on the kitchen doorknob and had a beautiful warm fantasy that when I flung wide the door the place would be gleaming, the sun glinting off the polished surfaces, all the cups and plates and bowls and pots and pans scrubbed and put away (in the correct cupboards).

Instead, as I gingerly picked my way through the debris, I was hard- pressed to find even an unbroken glass for my much-needed couple of as- pirin, never mind a clean one.

And while we're on the subject of dinner parties, I'd like the answer to a couple of questions.

Why, at dinner parties, does someone always tear all the paper off the labels on all the bottles of wine, so that when you come down in the morning the table is covered with little annoying sticky scraps of paper that stick to everything?

Why do I always use the butter dish as an ashtray?

Why does at least one person always say--usually fairly late in the evening--"I wonder what Dubonnet and Guinness would taste like?" or "What would happen if I lit my glass of Jack Daniels?"

And then proceed to find out.

Just for the record, the Guinness causes the Dubonnet to curdle in the most disgusting fashion and the Jack Daniels goes up like a Kuwaiti oil well, blistering the paint on the dining room ceiling.

To be fair to James--although why should I, the bastard--he was always very good about housework and especially about cleaning up after said dinner parties. He never got as drunk as I did, so at the very least he was in a fit condition to move most of the carnage from the dining table to the kitchen so that in the morning one room was fairly presentable. Apart from, of course, the Jack Daniels scorch marks on the ceiling. But at least I knew I could paint over them.

Again.

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I had some paint left from the last dinner party.

And the inevitable couple of hungover bodies usually to be found in an unshaven and disheveled state (and that's just the women) on the living room couch. In fact, they were nearly harder to get rid of than said scorch marks on the ceiling. Or the cigarette burns on the carpet.

Lying around for half the day, groaning and demanding cups of tea and aspirin and saying that they'll vomit if they move.

Anyway, I was doing it again.

Procrastinating, that is.

Trying to make myself think about the practicalities of no longer being with James was like trying to make myself look directly at the sun on a really bright day. Hard to do either, and they both made my eyes water.

I suppose I'd better think about the custody of Kate problem. Although was it a problem? James hadn't shown the slightest bit of interest in her. And, after all, he was the (boo, hiss!) adulterer. And because of this, what with him being the wrongdoer and everything, I supposed custody would be automatically awarded to me.

But instead of feeling triumphant about it, I didn't even feel relieved.

This was no victory.

I wanted James to care about our child.

I wanted my child to have a father.

I would have much preferred for James to bring me to court and indulge in bitter verbal battles and slander me by calling me a lesbian or a woman of low morals (no grounds for slander there, I'm afraid) or whatever. Be- cause, by trying to get custody of Kate by blackening my name, he would at least be caring about her.

I hugged Kate fiercely. I felt so guilty. Because somehow, somewhere, without my even knowing that I was doing it, I had messed up and because of that, poor Kate, innocent little bystander, had to do without her dad.

I just couldn't understand James.

Didn't he have any curiosity at all about Kate?

I couldn't make sense of it.

Was it because Kate is a girl?

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If the baby had been a boy would James have tried to make a go of things with me?

Who knew? I was just trying to make sense of a senseless situation.

And what about our apartment?

We had bought it together and it was in both our names. So what did we do?

Sell it and split the proceeds?

Me buy out his share and live there with Kate?

Me sell James my share and let him live there with Denise?

No way!

Over my dead body.

You know, anytime I'd heard people saying that passionately I just thought that they were being all Mediterranean and hot-blooded. That they were just playing to the camera and overreacting. And I knew that I'd said it myself thousands of times, but I'd never really meant it until that minute. But I meant it, really meant it then.

And what about money? How on earth was I going to manage to support Kate and myself on my salary?

I felt as if I'd wandered out onto a balcony and suddenly realized, to my horror, that there was no ground at all beneath me. Just lots and lots of limitless, empty space for me to fall through.

The thought of being without money was terrifying.

I felt as though I was nothing.

That I was just this faceless woman afloat in a big hostile universe with absolutely nothing to anchor me to anything.

I hated myself for being so insecure and so dependent. I should have been a strong, sassy, independent, nineties woman. The type of woman who has strong views and who goes to the movies on her own and who cares about the environment and can change a fuse and goes for aromather- apy and has an herb garden and can speak fluent Italian and has a session in a flotation tank once a week and doesn't need a man to shore up her fragile sense of self-esteem.

But the fact is, I wasn't.

I was perfectly happy to be a homemaker while my husband went out to earn the loot.

And if my husband was prepared to share the household

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chores as well as earn the lion's share of the loot, then so much the better.

I suppose I wanted to have my cake and eat it.

But then again, what were you going to do with your cake if not eat it?

Frame it?

Use it as a sachet in your underwear drawer?

How were James and I going to separate the funds from our joint bank account? I would have nearly given up all rights to the money to save all the inevitable wrangling. The only thing that was stopping me was the idea of James's spending it on Denise.

Besides, I'd seen a really nice pair of shoes yesterday in the mall and I wanted them for my own.

I can't describe the feeling of immediate familiarity that rushed between us. The moment I clapped eyes on them I felt like I already owned them. I could only suppose that we were together in a former life. That they were my shoes when I was a serving maid in medieval Britain or when I was a princess in ancient Egypt. Or perhaps they were the princess and I was the shoes. Who's to know? Either way I knew that we were meant to be togeth- er.