Primperfect (3 page)

Sometimes I wish there were two of me so I could give myself a smather. Sometimes I wish Fintan and I had never met at all.

Quote from Prim's mum's diary

saw a dead badger on the road this morning on the way to school and it looked like it was sleeping. I have always loved the black and grey and white look of badgers. There's something so sensible about how sturdy and stripy they are. I know they're supposed to be vicious and everything, but because they look like an illustration from a beloved childhood book, I kind of associate them with benevolence and sensible countryside wisdom. Its forepaw was draped halfway across its belly, as though it was snuggling into the side of the road to get comfortable. It wasn't, though. It was dead. I didn't expect the sight of it to have such an effect on me. I actually felt like I had seen a dead unicorn or something. I never expected that badgers lurked in grassy bits of Dublin. An omen, Sorrel (Mum's co-best friend, my sort of auntie) would call that.

Mum's diaries are kind of hard to process. I understand now why Dad left them till I was sixteen. They're lovely in a way, but I'm reading through the time she was with Fintan at the moment, and it's difficult. Because she is so young and even though she is older than I am now, it's not by much and I want to protect her from her future. How strong she will have to be, how brave! I don't know if I could be as brave and strong as Mum was but, at the same time, I kind of hope I would be. If a crisis happened, I would love to be able to deal with it gracefully. It is
REALLY
weird to be reading about the times that led to my conception. I mean, I know that they were together, but it kind of blows my mind that there was a time when my mum actually fancied my dad. Like, seriously fancied. The way I feel about Kevin sometimes when I am in a charitable mood or daydreaming out the window during class.

I think I am going to write another apology letter to Karen. I will read it out to Joel's voicemail and see if it is good enough to make him be friends with me again.

LETTER TO KAREN
draft 47
(UNSENT)

I miss him terribly. I don't have a lot of family and I don't want to lose the bits of it I have left. Especially Joel because he is a member of the family you build for yourself – the friends and allies you can call at three o'clock in the morning if you really need them. I rarely call people, though, when I'm in that sort of headspace. Because I don't like throwing my problems all over them and I know you can't rely on friends to, like, provide you with happiness. That has to come from yourself. Or something. Not that I'm an authority on happiness or anything, although I have my moments. Usually when I'm happy.

Joel is always such a huge part of my summer, to the point that we actually resent each other's holidays with family. Not that Fintan ever takes me anywhere – his holidays tend to be work-related. He should step up and fork out because I really want to go to Paris and walk around it in ballet pumps and a stripy jumper, pretending that I am an artist or some sort of muse to an artist or in an indie band with a cult following. Fintan isn't sure about Paris, because he associates it with his lost love, Hedda, who is now married to a human rights lawyer named Gallen, whom I have never seen and always picture as an elf.

I wish that Fintan had been nicer to my mum and not flirted with her housemate, Gillian, whom I have never met but will probably automatically hate if I ever do meet her because she was a disloyal and scheming friend. I wonder if that is how Joel feels about me.

Why is Fintan even with me? He doesn't think I'm half as interesting as the stock market or the other women he insists on flirting with even when I'm in the room. It's like he wants me to never be too sure of him. In fairness to him, it is working a charm.

Quote from Prim's mum's diary

ad is kind of with me yet against me on the whole Karen thing. He is with me because he understands that she is the devil, yet he thinks that I went ‘far too far', what with announcing her sexual orientation over the intercom. He thinks that the teachers realise that Karen is evil incarnate, but came down hard on me because they were worried that me ‘breaking in' (how is it breaking if the door isn't even locked?) to the principal's office and ‘commandeering' (how is it com mandeering if no-one else was even using it?) the intercom for purposes that were ‘not school-related' (I could argue this one, but – honestly – fair enough) would set a worrying precedent. It totally did, too. While I was suspended (but before Ms Cleary put the padlock on the office door) a second-year invited the whole school to her ‘free gaff' over the intercom in the hopes of popularity.

My outing of Karen, while hardly a public service announcement, had a sort of an odd justice to it. I did not do it for personal gain. I did it to get back at the devil. Which is kind of in keeping with my school's Catholic ethos. If anything I should be

I am not looking forward to September. So it's a good thing I have two and a bit months. One positive thing about the whole Karen situation was that I didn't stress about the Junior Cert at all. By the time all of that nonsense went down we were just going over stuff in most of the classes anyway, so it's not like I lost out. It was horrible not talking to Joel during the exams, though, because he'd be there talking about however things had gone for him and I'd pipe up and join in and he would just cut me dead. He'd do this thing where his eyes would sweep over me as if I wasn't there and it felt absolutely horrible.

Ciara was no help with the Joel situation. ‘I need to focus, Prim,' she kept saying whenever I wanted to talk about things that weren't whatever-exam-we-were-having-that-day-related. I mean, she'd talk about it for a while – she didn't, like, cut me dead or anything – but her heart wasn't in it. I could tell she really wished that, instead of asking her how to make Joel be my friend again and analysing his every mid-exam bathroom break, I would shut up and start pop-quizzing her on notable Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Who kind of reminds me of Fintan, if Fintan was a fifteenth-century man, with a beard and a ridiculous velvet hat.

Ferdinand Magellan is hotter than Christopher Columbus, but not by much. And, to be fair, there are very few people in all of history who are not more attractive than Christopher Columbus. The most handsome explorer of them all is charismatic conquistador Hernando Cortés. But you couldn't hit that and live with yourself because he was properly evil and massacred the Aztecs and stuff.

Fintan spent twenty-five pounds on a tie yesterday. What a ridiculous man he is! (Still fancy the pants off him, though.)

Quote from Prim's mum's diary

ad was mad stressed from work today. When he came home to find me reading Mum's diaries at the kitchen table he got all awkward. Which he should be, because he mostly comes off as an idiot in them. Whenever I find myself getting angry at past-Fintan, I take a break and read the diaries from long before she met him. (Fourteen-year-old Mum had yet to kiss a boy, much less a stupid man who didn't appreciate how wonderful she was.) It is weird, seeing bits of your mum most people never get to see. She hated business studies and loved English. She had a crush on a boy called Ruairí, who worked in the local shop. He was two years older than her and already had a girlfriend, called Maeve.

It is weird having little fragments of your mother all stored up to dole out to yourself. I was kind of hoping there'd be deep dark secrets and some sort of guide to how to live your life out as a decent human being enclosed with the diaries. No such luck, though. Mum seemed to mess up almost as much as me. Except she hasn't been suspended for homophobic bullying yet.

I think, back in the day, homophobic bullying was kind of normal. It was actually illegal for a man to make love to another man. It would be horrible to be put in prison just because you fell in love with someone or met someone you really wanted to do stuff with. And they didn't have a special sexy prison for people who were convicted of doing stuff that shouldn't even be illegal at all. They'd just be bunged right into normal prison with the murderers and rapists and drug dealers and what-not.

I would totally have visited Joel if he had been arrested and put in prison. In a way, if we lived back in the days when Mum was young and he was arrested for sexy times, it would be kind of a good thing for our friendship. Because he would have to talk to me then, if only to complain about how unfair the situation was. I am a bit Machiavellian sometimes. Which is probably a good thing because I quoted him in my history paper.