Ordinary Miracles (2 page)

I think it may start leaking out.

It’s time for my morning cuppa. I plug in the kettle and
turn on the radio, where a woman is talking about how her
husband urinates in the bath. Then the news comes on and
I remember I’m supposed to be meeting Susan and Anne at
eleven. I wonder if I should change out of my jeans, but I
don’t have time.

I haven’t seen Susan in years. She’s been a nurse in Africa.
She’s been leading the kind of adventurous, wandering life I
said I was going to lead too. I really, really, don’t want to
see her.

‘Hello Susan – great to see you!’ I say as Susan opens the door of her Ballsbridge garden flat. She’s looking wonderful.
She’s wearing jeans. She hasn’t changed her hair, but then
she has no need to. It’s dark and luxuriant. She puts it up
in a chignon from which tendrils and curls escape to frame
her pretty, thoughtful face.

‘Great to see you too!’ she exclaims, and gives me a hug. ‘Anne’s already here.’ I wave a greeting to Anne
who’s sitting on a calico sofa surrounded by handwoven
Persian-type cushions. She’s perched there like a bewildered
sparrow who’s found its way into a tropical garden.

Susan, Anne and I went to school together. After she qualified as a nurse Susan went travelling but sent letters, and of course Anne and I attended each other’s weddings.
Then we went our separate ways.

And now Susan has organised a reunion, because that’s
the kind of person she is. And while I know it might be
therapeutic and cheering to relive the day we all skived off school and went to see
Gone With the Wind
in seats
so close to the screen we could almost feel Rhett Butler’s
breath – the first thing that comes to my mind as I sit down beside Anne on the calico sofa is the man who urinates in
the bath.

‘Were either of you listening to the radio this morning?’ I
say as I look around the sun-filled room which is uncluttered
and spacious and painted a colour I didn’t know existed let
alone would work. A room full of African artefacts and
unexpected little touches. ‘Because this woman was on about
her husband.’

‘Do you mean the one who’s having an affair with his chiropodist?’ asks Anne.

‘No, the one who urinates in the bath when he’s drunk.’

‘Oh yes – because it’s easier to aim at.’ Anne laughs in a
hollow sort of way.

And before you know it we’re not talking about all the exciting things Susan has done in Africa, or how I got
involved with adult literacy and animal rights, or how Anne
became a Montessori teacher. No, we’re talking about men
– their selfishness and emotional tourism. The way they so
seldom know where to find the clothes pegs or the clitoris.
How they fumble around all right – but you have to tell them
in the end.

Anne and I talk about men while Susan, who is single, listens respectfully.

‘He keeps saying, “What do you want me to do about it?”’
Anne is talking about her husband.

‘Typical,’ I reply.

‘I just want him to listen. To try to understand.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I mean emotions aren’t like cars are they?’

‘No. No.’

‘You can’t just open up the bonnet and pump in a bit more oil.’

‘Exactly.’

Suddenly Susan jumps up from her crushed velvet cushion
and says ‘Sorry to interrupt but what’s it to be – tea or coffee?’

‘Tea please,’ I say.

‘Me too,’ says Anne.

I know Susan’s been bored from the eager way she heads
for the
kitchen. And then a funny thing happens. I suddenly realise I’ve been bored too. Extraordinarily bored in fact. I’ve been having these conversations about men with women like Anne for years now and they never seem to get anywhere. If I have to say one more thing about men this morning my head’s going to grow terribly heavy and land, thud, on the coffee table.

I get up and start to wander round the room. ‘As I was saying,’ says Anne who’s really getting into her stride, ‘he never seems to listen.’

I go over to the mantelpiece and pick up an African carving of a woman with huge breasts. ‘Ballsbridge is a funny name isn’t it?’ I say. ‘Balls-bridge – I wonder where that came from.’

Then Susan comes back with the tea and we talk about Africa until I blurt, ‘I’ll be forty next month.’ It’s been building up inside like alcoholism at an AA meeting.

‘My goodness of course! I’m glad you reminded me,’ Susan exclaims.

I’d forgotten we’d met when we kept birthday books. When we knew the ages and birthdays of everyone, including hamsters and dogs.

‘I must get you a present,’ Susan continues.

‘Oh, there’s no need really.’ I’m embarrassed and grateful.

‘Of course there is,’ says Anne, adding, ‘you know something Jasmine, you haven’t changed a bit.’

This being the kind of stupid thing friends sometimes say to each other I smile and finger my Turkish puzzle ring. Then Susan says casually, ‘Oh, by the way, I read that Mell Nichols is doing a film here.’

‘Mell Nichols is here – here in Ireland?’ I almost spill my tea.

‘Yes – he’s filming in County Wicklow, only it’s supposed
to be Yorkshire.’ Susan has always been a stickler for detail.
‘He’s playing a farmer who falls in love with the local
postmistress – that’s Meryl Streep – only she disappears in
mysterious circumstances. You’ve always had a soft spot for
Mell, haven’t you Jasmine?’

‘Well – yes – I do think he’s rather attractive,’ I mumble,
wondering if this is the moment to reveal that my soft spot has
somehow turned into hard, burning passion. That in recent
years Mell and I have spent sweat-soaked nights feverishly
exchanging bodily juices and soul-filled intimacies. That the
only small stumbling block to our perfect relationship is that
Mell doesn’t know anything about it.

‘I never really got over Clark Gable’ – Anne is twisting her
wedding ring dreamily. ‘I’ll never forget that day we all went
to see
Gone With the Wind.
Never.’

And then, because it’s sunny, we all go into the garden
which is gratifyingly messy but bears the first traces of
care. There are small clumps of begonias and climbing
nasturtiums. ‘I probably won’t stay here long but it’s nice to brighten it up a bit,’ says Susan.

And I know wherever Susan goes she’ll brighten things up
a bit because that’s her way. And maybe she could brighten
me up a bit too, if I could stop myself wondering where I
went wrong and she went right. If I could face the mess and
mystery of my own life – see that even weeds can bear small
flowers as they sprout through crazy paving.

Chapter
2

After leaving Susan’s I
wander round Ballsbridge for a bit and think about Mell Nichols. The fact that we are actually
in the same country at the same time has certainly increased the intimacy of our relationship. But it’s somehow added to
its poignancy too. Because when I’m not swooning in his
arms knowing he’ll love me for ever I know something else
entirely. I know I am a lonely middle-aged woman who he
wouldn’t even look at. I know that even though he is on the
same planet and in the same country, we will probably never
even meet.

But I’m not going to let myself dwell on this escapist
nonsense any longer. It’s a waste of time and time is precious
because one day we’re all going to die. It’s important to
remember that and it’s surprisingly easy not to. So now I’m
trudging down Pembroke Road and looking at people’s doors
and doorbells and the windows with lined curtains and the
dirty ones without lined curtains that are most likely rented. I’m trying to live in the moment – to be aware of each green leaf and footstep – but my mind keeps going back to Anne’s
remark about my not having changed.

While preposterous on one level, it seems to me to have a
certain ring of truth about it. To be pedantic, while change
has inevitably occurred, further change seems urgently called
for. I can’t keep drifting like this. I need to make some decisions. I’m glad I don’t pass a hairdresser’s because I
would almost certainly go in and attempt to entirely change
my persona.

My hair was styled in the ‘Gypsy Look’ when I met Bruce – a look that included long flouncy skirts and embroidered
boleros. Bruce thought I was wonderful. ‘What I like about
you, Jasmine,’ he used to say, ‘is that you’re so natural.’ There was just one teensy-weensy problem, he said. I couldn’t co-ordinate my colours. I got my pastels mixed up with my primaries and wore too many shades at once. This was sending out confused messages when I was not, in fact, a confused woman. Bruce is in television so he’s a visual sort of person.

I married him in cream. I’d been to a colour consultant
who told me winter people can wear white and black but, as
a summer person, they would drag me down. As it happened
my father had to virtually drag me down the aisle anyway as I was having second thoughts – I was only twenty. I kept pausing to admire the flowers at the end of each pew, and smile at friends in their wedding best, but actually I
was hoping my crazed past boyfriend Cyril would lurch drunkenly over the choir balcony and screech that I was a great screw and his for ever. In the ensuing uproar I would
have fled and found my way to a monastery or ashram and
pledged my life to Jesus, or Buddha, or whoever was running
that particular establishment.

It’s an option I still keep open.

It’s beginning to drizzle as I take out my mobile and call
Charlie about next Monday’s march. ‘I don’t want to be in
charge of the pig,’ I tell him.

‘She’s called Rosie.’

‘I know she’s called Rosie and I’m not leading her down O’Connell Street.’

‘Okay.’

‘I just wanted to get that straight, Charlie.’

‘Well you have.’

Then I hang up and since the rain is now bucketing down,
I go into Jurys hotel where I mingle with American tourists. I
don’t say anything. I just stand near them in the shop listening
to them bellow about Belleek china and Aran sweaters and
pretend I’m in California.

I have actually been to California. Susan and I went there
one summer when we were students. We worked in a café that had a big grand piano in it and lots of books. The café
was in the hippy Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. We worked like dogs but we felt like cats – feline and free.
That’s where we met the man we earmarked to take our
virginity.