Ordinary Miracles (39 page)

I stared glumly at my Turkish puzzle ring. I wasn’t sure I
liked this analogy. It seemed to be bringing sex into the realm
of office supplies.

‘I think sex can be very beautiful – with the right person,’
I announced, somewhat defensively. ‘I think – I know – it
can be a very spiritual experience.’

‘Yes. Yes,’ Susan said impatiently. ‘But even when it isn’t,
it wants to be. Afterwards. Even if the guy’s a creep, you still want him to phone. Sex affects women like that. It’s
pathetic.’

‘Well then, maybe women should stop sleeping with
creeps.’ I announced this grandly, like a proclamation.

‘Oh, Jasmine, you’re such an innocent. Sometimes you only
find out a guy’s a creep after you’ve slept with him. They’re
always nice beforehand.’

The conversation was beginning to depress me. When
Susan gets a bee in her bonnet she generalises in a most
demoralising way.

‘Surely if you know someone well before you have sex with
them, then all this is less likely to happen,’ I ventured. ‘I mean,
surely if there’s something there already, then sex may make
it more. Sex may bring you closer together.’

‘Yes, but there’s no guarantee.’ Susan announced this
flatly, as though it somehow settled the matter.

‘Of course there’s no guarantee, Susan. We’re not talking about dishwashers here. You have to take the risk. You’ve
taken the risk with Liam and he phones you, doesn’t he? He
loves you. What are you going on about?’

‘I haven’t really taken the risk with Liam.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I haven’t shown him the nasty bits yet. We just meet
once a fortnight. He hasn’t seen me like this. Whimpering.
Whingeing.’

‘I’m sure he’d get used to it.’ I tried to sound brisk and
reassuring. ‘I mean, there must be bits of him that he’s hiding too.’

‘I can’t believe anyone would love me if they really knew
me.’ Susan repeated. She was cradling her mug of tea. Her
face looked very wistful.

‘Oh no, we’re not back to that again,’ I sighed.

‘What you don’t seem to understand, Jasmine…’ Susan
peered at me strangely, as though she was wearing bifocals.
As though half of me was in focus and the rest blurred. ‘What
you don’t seem to understand is that I feel a fraud.’

‘Oh, is that all!’ I smiled with relief. ‘What you don’t under
stand, Susan, is that feeling a fraud is as common as muck.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I feel a fraud sometimes, and so does Charlie and – w
ait for it – so does Cait Carmody.’

‘Cait Carmody?’

‘Yes. Charlie works with her in the studio sometimes – w
hen she’s recording voiceovers. One day, when she was
rehearsing an ad about fabric conditioner, she stopped in mid-sentence and said, “Charlie – I feel a complete fraud.”’

‘Well, maybe she doesn’t use it.’

‘What?’

‘Fabric conditioner.’ Susan glared at me as if I were dense.

‘For God’s sake, Susan, she wasn’t talking about fabric
conditioner!’ I snapped. ‘She was talking about herself. About
acting. She’s insecure.’

Susan absorbed this information in a rather neutral manner.

‘That’s all you are, Susan. You’re just insecure.’ I waited for
her to look comforted, grateful. But she remained morose.

‘The thing about Liam is – he could really hurt me. You know, if I let myself get involved and then he lost interest.’

‘But that mightn’t happen, Susan.’

‘Yes, but it could. It’s happened before. I suppose that’s
why I sometimes feel it’s better – you know – to go for the
ones I don’t mind losing.’

‘I don’t know, Susan,’ I muttered. ‘It sounds a bit bleak to me.’

I wished we could get off this subject. I was beginning to find it most uncomfortable. How could I lecture Susan about
Liam, when I was so mixed up about Charlie? I began to hope
that one of us, at least, would begin to show more courage in
these matters. Hack some sort of pathway through the love
jungle that the other could follow. But somehow this seemed
less and less likely. We were getting old, Susan and I. Old and
cautious.

‘What Liam doesn’t know is, if I let myself love him, I’d become a bit like an amoeba,’ Susan announced dis-con
certingly. ‘A sort of big blob of longing and loathing. I’d
change.’

I had to admit Susan was not painting a very pretty picture.
Susan in love was beginning to sound like ‘The Creature
from the Swamp’.

‘Do you know what I think, Susan?’ I said. ‘I think we
both need therapy. Piles and piles of it. Like people in New York.’

‘But that’s expensive,’ Susan looked up at me, half-hopeful.

‘Yes, but you haven’t tried Teddy,’ I smiled. ‘Teddy doesn’t
charge.’

That evening, as Susan was driving away, I looked at the
weeds that were growing at the front of our house – springing
up between the cracks in the crazy paving. Bruce used to get
at them with weed-killer early on, but I left them because
I couldn’t be bothered. And now I’m glad I didn’t interfere
because – because some of them have grown little flowers. I
like those little flowers very much.

I haven’t done much gardening lately – or housework. I’ve
been busy with other things. I’ve taken on more literacy
students and I’m learning how to do aromatherapy massage.
Professional massage – not the kind of intimate stuff Al and
I got up to on the beach. A lot of people need massage these
days, apparently, and you can make quite a good income from it. I’ve learned this because I’ve started to have the occasional aromatherapy massage myself. As I lie there,
prone and trusting, a strange sympathy suffuses me. For
myself. For everyone.

It’s funny that I’m studying aromatherapy massage and
not Avril.
Avril: The Aromatherapist,
that’s what I suggested
Bruce should call his film. I said that at that dinner party
where he and Cait Carmody kissed in the kitchen. It seems
like centuries ago, and not just one year.

Avril: A Woman’s Story
was televised the other night. I
suppose part of me hoped that, considering all we’d been
through, Bruce might revamp the storyline slightly. That he
might make Avril a little more sassy. A little less dutiful. But
Avril, in the main, remained faithful to her original script.
The only new characteristic she seemed to have developed
was an aversion towards ironing.

Katie and Sarah come to stay here occasionally. Sarah does
not use the spare bedroom. My daughter is a lesbian. This
has now been confirmed. It would take too long to describe
the myriad emotions I felt on this announcement. As I watch
them holding hands on the sofa, I feel like I’m in a film and
the script’s got mixed up. ‘No! No!’ I want to shout to the
director. ‘She doesn’t have a serious relationship for ages yet,
a
nd when she does it’s with a fantastically supportive man
who isn’t in the least bit jealous when she wins the Nobel
Prize. She travels all over the world and does all the things I wish I’d done. Eventually she even has two kids – a boy and
girl. This bit on the sofa isn’t right at all.’

But it is right. It’s right for Katie. And who knows – maybe
she will travel the world and win the Nobel Prize. ‘Nothing
has prepared me for this,’ I think as I watch them go up to
Katie’s bedroom, together. But she’s happy, and that’s all
Bruce and I said we wanted for her. I have to remind myself
frequently of this fact.

I understand my mother better now as I sit, as she so often
did, munching toast morosely at the kitchen table. It takes
time to adjust to things not being like you thought they’d
be. It seems to have taken me most of my adult life. But
lately I’ve been realising that wanting things to be different
all the time has stopped me from seeing, appreciating, things
as they are.

I’ve been looking at some of the old family photos I saved from the black plastic bags and searching them for clues.
Studying the expressions closely I realise my mother may have been happier than I, or indeed she, thought.

She wasn’t contented of course. She wasn’t ecstatic or over
the moon. She was under the moon and it puzzled her. It lured
her back and forth between misery and acceptance, like the
tides. She wasn’t her own witness. She didn’t stand back sometimes, from her own still centre, and smile. Or maybe she did – just occasionally. How can one know these things?
How can one judge?

‘Look, Mum – the moon has a face. It’s smiling – it’s
laughing at us,’ I remember saying to her when I was ten.

‘Yes, Jasmine, so it is,’ she said. ‘I wish it would share
the joke.’

I thought this was a joke in itself when she said it. I laughed
and laughed with the moon, and then I stopped. My mother was crying. I’d made her cry – that’s what I’d done. And how
could she love me if I made her cry? I didn’t look at the moon
for a long time after that. I suppose you could say I sulked.

When I got older Mum sometimes used to take me to movies in a nearby town. We’d settle into the velvet red seats contentedly, secure in the knowledge that, for
an hour-and-a-half at least, life would have some sort of
discernible plot. The films tended to be mushy and none
too memorable. But the ads were great. I especially liked
the one for Martini…‘the most beautiful taste in the world’. Martini, as far as I could make out, tasted like a
huge happy multi-coloured hot air balloon. A balloon that
bore its laughing passengers over mountain peaks, drifting
deliciously in the benign breeze.

This contrasted pleasantly with my other favourite ad – the
one for Badedas which was more home-based yet also held
the promise of travel. It was Susan’s favourite too.

The ad featured a woman draped decorously in a bath towel. The woman was staring out a window. She wasn’t
staring out a window in the way I so often do now –
half-sullenly – perhaps wondering if it’s about to rain. No,
this woman was staring expectantly because she’d just had a Badedas bath. Her anticipatory state was a consequence
of this. ‘Things happen after a Badedas bath,’ the ad told
us, adding beguilingly…‘perhaps it’s something to do with
the horse chestnuts’.