Ahern Cecelia

Short Stories: The Every Year Collection

CECELIA AHERN

Every Year

1 Every Year

Every year I watch them. Every year I see the changes, how the days and seasons apart have somehow softened their tongues. Each year the evidence is faint but palpable all the same. If you look closely at the edges, at the curve of the smiles once tight, the relaxed shoulders once hunched and the flow of words once clipped, you can see that their edges have blurred like the early-morning sun’s effect on the annual ice sculpture on the lawn. Look more closely and somewhere in its hard, frosty exterior you can see, can hear, the drip, drip, drip of its hard shell slipping away. A transparent cold drop warmed just enough to allow release; the warmth letting it know it’s not a flaw to thaw. Time has been this family’s sun. Year after year, I have seen the coldness slipping away from them until I see them now, together and cocooned by the warmth of Christmas Day.

Every year I’m taken from the dark dusty confines of an attic by the same pair of hands, but every year those hands have felt different. Over the years they carried not only me, but the weight of more responsibility. I feel it in his grip now, feel it by the heaviness of his steps down the stairs. I’ve gone from being carelessly mauled and dropped by his once dirty, childish hands to being cradled in the ones I see wrapped around me now. They are those of a man, creator of his own bearers of dirty, careless hands, and now they of theirs. I was given to him by his father, a special July deal in the front window of a rundown hardware store in the 1920s, where the paint blistered and peeled from its exterior until it was pared right down to nothing.

Like my carrier I am old, and he shares me with his own family now. We are slow going down the stairs this year, his breathing loud and his hands frail. I don’t feel secure in his leather-like skin as in previous years, and I’m fearful of his accidentally releasing me from his clutches as he used to in the giddiness of his childhood. I note the full circle that life has taken for him; he is getting older, yet younger, as though time were moving in two directions. Every year his body declines but his spirit doesn’t. He lives for this time of year, for his family to gather around him, knowing he and his wife are the flame to their moths’ gathering.

I’m placed on the table before the crackling fire. I see the stockings line the mantelpiece, every year an added sock for a new little one. I see the multicoloured presents piled high under the tree, shimmering paper wrapped in big delightful bows all heckling to be untied and ripped open. He and she had spent all week wrapping these, I know from hearing their muffled voices below my place in the attic, and I know that the month-long lead-up to Christmas has been spent shopping for them together. Careful, thoughtful, shared decisions made while strolling under the decorative lights, bundled up in hats, scarves and gloves as the world raced around them. They took it all in, cheered as the lights were turned on, hoisted awestruck grandchildren onto Santa’s lap and noticed as more trees appeared in windows in the great big build-up to today.

They are the irreplaceable weeks where everyone feels the hands of time tick by louder as the day approaches, beating faster in the big rush until hearts are left banging in chests in anticipation and expectation. I wait with the old man for the crowd to arrive. I look around the room with him, see the pride in his eyes, sense the excitement rush through his veins of another year, another day all being together. My God, they don’t happen often enough, I know he thinks.

The doorbell rings and time’s ticking hands are drowned out by the tinkling Christmas tunes; the flames of candles by the window dance excitedly on their wicks as the cars pull up outside; the lights on the tree sparkle and wink at him, encouraging him to make his way to the door. Build-up over, it’s time. His troops begin to arrive. One by one.

Big hugs for Mum and Dad, woolly jumpers embrace polo-necks to oohs and aahs of delight as the cinnamon, pine, Brussels sprouts and cooking turkey tickle their senses. Children race around in excitement, their little hearts overfilled with the joy of the morning’s magic. They poke at the presents, eye the name tags, stare at the chimney while shaking their heads, wondering and conferring among one other how on earth he did it. And then the annual stories are told: of hearing him on the roof, seeing the reindeers fly off and even meeting the great man himself. Wide eyes and wows for the little ones who have slept through the night, rolled eyes for the elders who hide their smiles while secretly wishing for that feeling within them to return. What a great man, the little ones all agree, while munching on mince pies. What a great man.

And then the conversation, stilted at first, of those who once shared bedrooms and secrets, once fought over toys and friends and huddled under bed sheets with torches, begins. Here they are on the one day of the year on which the parental flame shines brightly enough to attract them all at once. The room is now a hotpot of past, present and future family. All eyes are on the kids, the ones who bathe in the excitement of the day and who, in turn, reflect the magic back to their parents.

He announces he’s going to put me on top of the tree and the little ones rush to gather around. The old man takes me into his frail hands. The routine applause sounds the same to them every year, but not to me. Like the ice sculpture, you must pay close attention. The tones have varied as the time has gone by. In the early years it was excitement, the joy of little ones’ first experiences. Then, as the years passed and time floated away as gently and subtly as a feather in the wind, cheers turned to jeers and excitement to boredom as hormones flailed around in changing bodies, kicking and screaming. This year they are adults: mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts who have learned to understand all that was misunderstood in teenage years. They applaud loudly and joyously, with their own excited little ones hopping around by their sides, craning their necks to look at me with great awe.

My, they’ve grown. I’ve seen their changing faces over the years, how as teens they began to learn to hide their frustrations well, just as the December weather masks the ground outside. The snowflakes drift, altering the landscape and covering the rough and the ugly in a smooth, brilliant white.

I have sensed already that I won’t be carried to my place next year by the same pair of hands. I sensed it by his shaking and by how his eyes filled up when the others weren’t looking. Instead of going directly towards the tree, he turns and I find I’m being handed to Tom, whose twelve-year-old mouth gapes open as I’m passed from old hands to new. The eldest grandson looks back to his mother and father, who nod encouragingly and smile with pride.

Tom brings me slowly towards the tree. It looks bigger now than it used to as I lie in the protective hands of a smaller boy. As we get closer, it looms and the tinsel glitters and the branches smell of glorious pine. I see our reflection in a red bauble. I see the excitement and anxiety in Tom’s face as he takes each careful step, not wanting to ruin the moment. With his back turned to the hushed family he takes a step up the ladder. I’m ceremoniously perched in my presiding place.

They think it’s going to be the same all the time, but I know it’s not. They used to think, in their raging hormonal days, that they would rather be anywhere but here at this dinner table, on this day, but now they know differently. I see them, looking to their parents, as their little ones look to them.

The same every year they think, but look closely, for it’s not.

That’s what makes people so sad and so happy at this time. That is the bittersweet magic of Christmas. It’s different and magical and wonderful and every year rich with the air of too much said and too much unsaid. They’ve realized that these are the days when edges are blurred, tongues are burned and softened and eyes are filled with the drip, drip, drip of never wanting to leave, never wanting to say goodbye to these golden moments, longing to bring back the precious days and all the people in them.

Every day of every year they long for the time when they will feel like this: together, cocooned by the warmth of Christmas Day.

2 Twenty-four Minutes

Steven awoke to his alarm ringing at seven a.m. Waking up, the first disappointment of every day, was as usual followed by its faithful friend, dread. The alarm was like a siren, a warning bell: get up or else! Slowly rolling over, he stretched out his arm and punched down on the clock. Although the room was silenced, the ringing continued in his eardrums. What he would give to sleep all day, to close his lids and block out the light! Once again he had spent another night glaring unblinkingly at all-night Teletext and infomercials, sleep, as usual, not coming easy.

He looked vacantly at the growing crack on his magnolia ceiling and listened as the kids next door fought to use the bathroom. Walls like cardboard separated their two-bedroom-and-a-box-room town houses, stuffed together like shoeboxes in the dusty stockroom of a department-store basement: piled high, packed tight, squeezed in, airtight. Multicoloured toylike houses for first-time buyers, pristine and pastel with pretty thresholds to cross, blinding buyers from the realization they’d just crossed the most expensive toll they were ever likely to pay. Suburban bliss.

Steven could imagine what all the people looked like from above, lab rats running around the maze of houses, pointlessly, distracted by irrelevant and unnecessary daily routines. Did nobody think, What is the point? Did nobody else feel like suddenly stopping what they were doing, looking up to the GamesMaster in the sky and refusing to continue playing this stupid game?

He exhaled slowly, counting to three as the screaming next door turned to tears, the knocking on the door turned to kicks and the dog’s barking turned to howls. Kicking the covers off, he wearily pulled his body out of bed and began his morning routine: shower, dress—shirt, suit, tie—coffee, alarm, front door, walk to the train station. The monotony, monotonous. Night out on a Thursday, hangover on a Friday, football on a Sunday. Every week identical.

One thousand five hundred and twenty-seven steps to the train station and he would arrive at the platform at exactly 07.42, met by the same tired faces, the same bored expressions, the same coats, briefcases, hairstyles and shoes. Everyone was uniformed up and ready for battle. Nobody spoke, nobody smiled, there was just the occasional cough, beep of a mobile phone and the fuzzy sounds of personal stereos as commuters stared blankly and wearily into space, eyes glassy and sleepy, their previous night’s dreams still fresh in their minds, their beds not yet cold.

The sign over the platform declared a three-minute wait, as it always did when he arrived. The man beside him in the brown suede coat was consistently ahead of him, the woman with the black briefcase, torn at the corner and with a scratch through the middle, always behind him. Everything was done in perfect unison, their life predictable, no matter how much longer they took drinking their coffee in the morning and no matter how many extra minutes were spent closing their eyes under the soothing hot water of the shower, dreaming of somewhere and something else.

Finally, the familiar sound forced a few heads to turn and a few eyes to blink out of their trance. The wail of the horn, the vibrations on the tracks, the hiss and squeal as the train prepared to stop—everyone moved forward and took their positions. As the train slowed, dull faces on crammed bodies stared outside at them, expressionless. Nobody got off, everybody got on an already crowded train. Steven got on last. He always did.

He stepped through the door and could move no further. He turned his back on the faces staring at him and held his breath as the door slowly shut. He said goodbye to fresh air and looked out of the small dirty window at people running to the platform, seconds late, panic and frustration scrawled across their faces. How different their days would be now. A second too late and they were out of the rat race. He watched them as the train pulled away; envying them while, inside the train, hot, tired bodies huddled together in the cramped conditions, rocking back and forth with the swaying carriage. Some slept as they stood; music and chat from earphones kept others awake.

The train slowed and stopped at the next station. Doors opened, no one disembarked, more tried to squeeze in. Steven found himself being forced in further, away from the door. The toilet door opened—a distasteful odour emanating out to an already stuffy atmosphere—and three students disappeared inside for space.

The doors closed and the train moved on. The atmosphere was tinged with morning breath, coffee and BO. One person fainted, there was a scuffle to move her forward and help her off at the next stop where she was left on the bench, flushed, embarrassed and gasping for air.

Sardines in a housing estate, sardines in a train. Everywhere he went Steven was squashed, trapped, his mind cluttered with a million messy thoughts packed together so tightly he thought his head would explode. But he was keeping it together, he was waking up each morning and reminding himself to breathe. But not in this stuffy carriage, he would hold his breath here, as he had been doing over the past few years of his life, waiting for things to get better. Battling with his mind to cheer up and see the positive, losing each time and lying down even more battered and bruised.

But today was different, today he would be victorious. Today he would receive confirmation of his promotion, a promotion that would allow him to leave the stuffy, cluttered and windowless confines of his basement office, piled high with paperwork and metallic filing cabinets, so uninspiring and so small he didn’t even have space to pace. Today he would win the battle and race those steps like Rocky, dancing at the top with his fists in the air.

But he had to get there first and the train hadn’t moved for fifteen minutes. People were beginning to get agitated, feeling the strain of their personal space being invaded. Steven could move only his head: his arm and briefcase were caught behind him. When he turned his head one way he received a mouthful of frizzy hair; the other way led him to stare directly into the face of a heavy-breathing, overweight and balding man. He chose the hair.

Without any explanation as to why they hadn’t moved, the train moved on again, jerking and spluttering along the track and trying to pick up pace with its heavy load. The next stop spat out six people and sucked in ten more, and Steven breathed in the last of the fresh air before the door closed, the frizzy hair tickling his nose as he did so. The newcomers explained that the delay was due to a man jumping in front of a train further along the line. Someone tutted in annoyance and checked his watch. =He wouldn’t have felt a thing’ was the last sentence uttered before the seconds of chat ended and they were once again plunged into silence, leaving the woman who had spoken flushed in the face, as if struck by the silliness of her words.

=How could anyone do that?’ one woman had asked in confusion and horror. Steven understood how, he understood what it was like to want to get out of a situation so much you’d do anything. Standing trapped between strange bodies on the connecting joints of a train every morning, then working in a windowless office cell without any human contact, looking at so many numbers for so many hours that they all began to look the same. Everything felt as if it was moving in on him, his world was getting smaller, it was fading away and was forcing him to live only in his head. A head that was pounding, exhausted, fed up and growing tired of listening to himself. When there was nothing holding you up, nothing to show there was a point to all this, when there was no one capable of putting a smile on your face, he understood how a person could do it. He understood it very well.

The train eventually stopped at Tara Street Station and the door opened with a hissing sound, like the loosening of a mineral-bottle lid. It had the same effect as a birdcage being opened; out through the door they all fluttered, tiredly bumping into one other as they walked at different paces downstairs and on into the fresh air. The sun was rising over O’Connell Bridge, the buildings casting shadows on the pavements. Steven walked in and out of the darkness as he moved with the rolling crowd, just one more body, just another meaningless overactive mind churning on a crowded city pavement.

Two thousand six hundred and four steps to the bank. They all marched on in full uniform to the beat of a drum. Forty-eight steps downstairs to his office, where he took his position in the firing line and awaited the moment Gerard Rush, his boss, would give him the good news.

Twelve noon sharp, and the door to Steven’s office opened, banging against his desk. Gerard popped his head around the door. His face said it all. His complexion was grey and his expression grim.

‘I’m sorry, Steven. They decided to go with Andy in the end. I fought for you, I really did.’ Gerard sat before him, his back almost touching the door of the small office. His voice was sincere, his apology genuine.

The promotion was the one thing he had had to look forward to, so much so that it had become the solution to every problem. Everything would be all right when he got the job. It was the crutch that had helped him limp along. It wasn’t a lifelong ambition, it wasn’t his aim in life to sit behind padded porridge screens leafing through files, it was just that there was nothing else. There were no other distractions, no other goals or interests. It was all there, every little hope in the world pinned right on the promotion. His last crutch had been taken away and now he was falling.

The woman’s voice from the train came back to him—He wouldn’t have felt a thing— and suddenly there was clarity. He had found another crutch, albeit a temporary one.

Gerard watched him—his grey and wrinkled face full of concern—expecting him to scream, shout and fire the stapler at his head. The strip lighting buzzed loudly in the silence that ensued. But Steven smiled, a big broad smile that Gerard hadn’t seen for years.

‘No worries, Gerard, I understand,’ he beamed, his eyes lighting up.

Gerard looked confused. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Yep,’ he chirped, leaning back in his bony chair, looking around his closet-sized office proudly. He repeated confidently, ‘Yep. Absolutely.’

‘OK.’ Gerard nodded quickly, confused by his reaction. ‘Well, that’s a great attitude to have, I must say. Do you want to take a break or anything, get a breath of fresh air?’ He studied his face closely.

Steven laughed. ‘Yes, actually, I will in a while, but in the meantime I’ll get back to work on this lot. He picked up a pile of papers and banged them down on front of him, the dust bouncing up from the old table.

‘Right.’ Gerard paused. ‘OK.’ He stood up and got ready to leave. ‘I’m very sorry, Steven,’ he said sincerely, holding out his hand.

Steven looked up from the stack of papers and took Gerard’s hand. ‘Thanks, Gerard.’ He grasped his hand tighter, holding on that little bit longer. ‘Thanks for everything.’ His voice was gentle.

‘No problem, Steven. It’s my pleasure.’ He gulped lightly, not liking the change in atmosphere. ‘It’s not the end of the world, remember, it’s just a job,’ he stressed.

Steven picked up the phone and called his parents.

Twenty minutes later he put on his suit jacket, turned off the buzzing strip lighting and exited his office. He waved at Gerard down the hall, who hesitantly gave him the thumbs-up. With a spring in his step he hadn’t felt for years, he walked the forty-eight steps to the ground floor and outside into the fresh air.

He walked the two thousand six hundred and four steps to the train station, the streets quieter now with everyone buried at work. As he entered the station his head felt light, no longer heavy and pounding. A haze had lifted from his mind, a weight from his shoulders, and he experienced a sensation of floating he’d never had before. He was happy, clear in his mind of what he wanted to do. He didn’t want to worry any more, he didn’t want to feel scared, and he didn’t want his mind to keep torturing him. He knew what he needed to do and he wouldn’t feel a thing.

He entered his train ticket into the machine and pushed his way through the barrier, relieved that for once in his life his destination was unknown. Anywhere but here. Arriving on the platform, hands trembling and heart pumping with adrenaline, he was glad to see that the station was empty. His mind was focused. There was only one way for him to go. He glanced up at the sign hanging over the platform. The next train would be in twenty-four minutes. Twenty-four minutes was a long time to wait. He needed to do it now. Angrily, he kicked a can and sent it flying off the platform and onto the tracks. He watched it lie there, knowing its destiny. He had nothing to do but pace the yellow line he had obediently stayed behind his whole life. Today he would cross it. His skin grew clammy and a chill ran through his body. He could do this.

Twenty minutes. What would Gerard think when he didn’t get back to work? He pictured his friendly boss staring down the hall, making sure Steven had returned. He had known something was up, he had felt it in his handshake and seen it in his eyes. It wouldn’t be long before he entered his office and saw the note. Steven played out the scene. Gerard would panic, call the gardaí, and they would immediately set out looking for him. But they wouldn’t find him. Not the way they wanted to anyway.

He glanced up at the sign. Sixteen minutes. He paced the yellow line, clenching and unclenching his fists. What would the lads think when he didn’t turn up to football on Sunday? They’d be angry he’d let them down, at having to take Rory Malone off the bench for the first time since he scored an own goal in last year’s final. He could imagine them all bitching about him over a few pints after the game, blaming Rory Malone and Steven’s no-show for their loss. Maybe the next day they’d find out what happened and hopefully understand.

If only they knew how his days were covered in darkness, as if someone had turned off the light switch in his mind; if only they knew how his waking up in the morning was the first disappointment of every day. He was tired, he had nothing left to give, no more ideas to try. If they could understand that, then they could understand his decision.

Nine minutes left. The crowd at the train station. How would they feel? Would they even notice he wasn’t there? The lady with the torn briefcase and the man in the brown suede coat, would they notice him missing from the middle of their daily queue. Would they notice that one more person than usual could squeeze into the train? Would they be looking out of the dirty window as the train pulled away, waiting for him to run onto the platform, out of breath and panicked at having missed the train? When the platform was empty, would they even notice? Would they remember the previous day’s talk about the man jumping in front of the train and would that woman, that same woman, think, He wouldn’t have felt a thing, just to make herself feel better, so she could sleep well that night and rest easy in her bubble?

Four minutes. His granddad. What would he think? Would he even know what had happened, or understand? He could imagine him being told by the nurse that his only grandson had passed away. He could imagine him asking, ‘What grandson? Steven who?’ and settling down to watch his geraniums blow in the breeze on his windowsill. Steven smiled as he walked faster and faster to the end of the platform, his head dizzy with relief. He needed to get off the platform now and onto the tracks so that he caught the train before it slowed down. He wanted to have to do this only once.

He crossed the yellow line and jumped down off the platform. He could see a man on the opposite platform waving frantically but he couldn’t hear a word he said. His mind was focused on the sounds of the train as it approached the bridge over the city, the wail of the horn, the vibrations on the tracks, the hiss and squeal of the wheels. His heart beat faster, his throat dried up and he loosened his tie. He glanced back at the board. One minute. His parents. What would they think? This would destroy them. He pictured them receiving the news, remembering their last conversation on the phone when he told them both he loved them, how they had joked and laughed together and how he had sounded happier than they could remember in a long time. As he walked along the edge of the track towards the train, high above the city, the Liffey below him, he thought about what they would be doing now. His father would be out in his garden on this fine day and his mother would be on the phone. She was always on the phone. His father would be calling things to her, giving her a step-by-step narration of the state of the garden while she waved at him wildly, trying to signal to him that she was on the phone. But he’d keep talking anyway.

He noticed he had stopped walking and was midway over the bridge. The train was coming; the ground beneath his feet was shaking. It was time to look up to the sky and admit defeat. He had had enough. Now was his time. If he was going to do it, he had to step out now.

His hair blew wildly as he pressed his eyes together fiercely, holding his breath. His heart beat faster and the blood in his veins pumped violently around his body. He could feel his pulse beating in his throat. The sound was unbearable, a loud thunderous sound, like the sky falling down around him. And then the wind stopped. His hair stopped blowing and his chest relaxed.

Steven opened his eyes, breathed deeply, peeled himself from the side of the bridge and shakily climbed back up onto the platform.

Twenty-four minutes. A long time to have to wait to die. Exactly how long it took him to figure out he didn’t want to.

3 Next Stop: Table for Two

Lucy leaned her head against the window and felt the vibrations as the DART pulled away from the station. Her head repeatedly bumped against the glass as the carriage trembled. Like her, it seemed tired and fed up as it rattled along the tracks, shuddering occasionally as if almost falling asleep and then suddenly jerking awake in fright. Lucy tried to keep her eyes open. She sank down into the uncomfortable seat and looked around the carriage.

Couples.

Everywhere.

She decided to keep her eyes closed. The rhythmic rocking of the train comforted her and she felt herself drifting away. The train shuddered, Lucy’s head jerked and her eyes flew open. They were stopping again. There was something about the train that she felt she connected with. It felt to her as if it too was tired of doing the same thing every day; tired of going up and down the same route all day, only being permitted to stop and start, stop and start and never fully gather speed. The monotony of it all made Lucy yawn.

She understood how it felt being surrounded by crowds of people every day, never physically being alone but all the time feeling it. She knew what it was like being used to get people from A to B, helping them get to where they wanted to go but never being able to join them.

Lucy watched as a couple stood up from their seats and walked hand in hand from the train. Once on the platform, the man draped his arm over his partner’s shoulder and kissed the top of her head. She responded by wrapping her arm around his waist, tucking her hand into the back pocket of his jeans and resting her head on his shoulder. They fitted together perfectly. Like a jigsaw. They strolled towards the exit as if time didn’t exist. Beside them on the platform stood a smartly dressed man with a beautiful bouquet of flowers in his hand. He was looking at his watch anxiously and studying the train timetable. Lucy imagined the woman he was meeting, waiting for him elsewhere, nervously looking at her watch wondering if he was going to show.

Go, Lucy screamed in her head to the train. There was urgency in the voice in her head. She didn’t want to see any more displays of love.

As though the train were in tune with her thoughts, the doors slid closed slowly and it started moving again. Still not yet in the city, the train sped happily past golden fields, knowing that it didn’t have to stop for at least a few more minutes. Lucy smiled as she looked at the view, at the greens, browns and golds all blurring together with the speed. Minutes later the reins were pulled from behind and the train screeched on the tracks, its cry of frustration at having to slow down.

Slow down, stop and start again.

The doors slid open slowly, tiredly, and invited another couple inside. The man sat beside Lucy, the woman across from him. She seemed the same age as Lucy. She smiled at her partner, her eyes twinkled. He blew her a butterfly kiss and winked. Her face softened even more and she continued to watch him as if he was the most interesting thing in the world. Their knees touched in the centre of the booth; they were touching and smiling so much that Lucy had to close her eyes again.

Finally it was Lucy’s stop. She jumped up before the train began to slow down, pushed her way through the kissing knees and waited at the doors. They opened slowly for her. Thanks, see you again tomorrow, she whispered quietly to the train, and stepped out into the cold afternoon. She buttoned up her coat to protect herself from the bite of the cold February wind, she felt the breeze slap her across the face, sting her ears and numb her nose. She shoved her hands deep into her pockets, kept her head down and made her way to work.

The day was 14 February. Valentine’s Day. Lucy worked as a waitress in a French cuisine restaurant in Dublin’s city centre. They were going to be incredibly busy that evening, and there had been the annual argument about who would work that night. Everybody wanted the night off to spend with their loved ones but they knew better than to ask Lucy. Of course she would work. Her position was the same every night but especially tonight, on a night that celebrated the joy of loving. Everyone knew that.

Lucy had never been in love before. She would be thirty-one next month and she had never been in love. She had never had that look the girl beside her on the train had painted all over her face; she had never had anyone blow her kisses or wait anxiously with a bouquet of flowers while worrying that being late would mean precious time being stolen away, like the man at the train station. She had never received a bouquet of flowers. She had never known what it was like to feel a kiss on the top of her head through her hair. She had never shared that look. Never shared that feeling. She had never looked into anyone’s eyes and seen forever with him, never felt such a connection that made her want to be with him and only him for the rest of her life. She had never been with anyone who immediately made her start thinking of her future babies’ names. She didn’t dream of fairytale wedding days with princess brides and handsome Prince Charmings.

But she knew about all these things. She knew they existed. She read about them in books and saw them on trains. She listened to friends and grew up with parents in love. And better yet she believed in love. But the older she got, with every passing year that failed to bring her a soulmate, she believed less and less that love was for everyone. Just for the lucky ones. And the longer she went without it, the more she saw it every day until it smothered her, wrapping its arms around her, like great big bear hugs of loneliness.

She hurried down Grafton Street and ignored the men and women standing together but alone outside Bewley’s Café, stamping their feet to stay warm and looking at their watches nervously. She pushed through the crowd gathered around the flower stall outside the Westbury Hotel and received mouthfuls of orchids, lilies and roses as people bumped into her in their rush to get home. She scurried by the entrance to Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre hearing loud greetings, hugs and kisses as other halves arrived at the meeting place. Everywhere people looked at their watches. They all had somewhere to be.

People spilled out of card stores, with little paper bags in their hands. Big red love hearts hung in shop windows grabbing at the heartstrings of passers-by and pulling them in as though they were puppets. Lucy’s head and heart sank, her heavy heart causing her feet to drag against the ground. She turned right into her restaurant along Stephen’s Green. A Valentine’s Day special menu was displayed outside the door. More big red bubbly hearts.

At 6.30 p.m. the door opened as the evening’s first customers arrived. Lucy greeted them at the desk with a smile bright enough to light the room.

‘Hello and welcome,’ she smiled happily at them.

‘Thank you. Table for two?’ the man asked politely looking around the empty restaurant.

‘Have you a reservation?’ she smiled.

‘Yes. McCullough for six thirty.’

Lucy scanned through the list. ‘Of course, Mr McCullough. May I take your coats?’ She took their coats, led the couple to the table and handed them their menus. Always bringing people from A to B but never being able to join them.

The door opened and shut again as man and woman stepped inside, their cheeks and noses rosy from the cold.

‘Hello and welcome,’ Lucy said perkily.

‘Thanks. A table for two, please,’ the man said, looking around the practically empty restaurant.

Lucy smiled through gritted teeth. ‘Have you a reservation?’

‘Yes, it’s under O’Hanlon,’ he said peering over the desk onto her page. She scanned down through the list and ticked their names.

‘May I take your coats?’ She took their coats, led the couple to their table and handed them their menu. The same routine all day every day.

The door opened and closed.

‘Hello.’ Lucy smiled.

Stopping and starting, stopping and starting all over again. Never allowed to go at her own speed or take another route.

‘Table for two, please,’ the lady said, and a lump formed in Lucy’s throat. Her hand began to shake as her finger leafed through the reservations book. Table for two. The words taunted her.

‘Have you a reservation?’ she asked as happily as she could.

‘The name’s Cooper,’ she replied.

Lucy ticked their names. ‘May I take your coats?’ she asked the pair. She took their coats, led them to their table and handed them their menus. The door opened and closed.

‘Welcome.’ Lucy smiled at the boy and girl before her. She guessed they were around sixteen.

‘Thanks,’ the boy said shyly. There was a silence as they all just looked at each other. The girl nudged the boy in the ribs. ‘Ow!’ he yelped, and then realized he was supposed to speak. ‘We were wondering if we could eat here.’

The girl smirked.

‘I mean, can we have a table?’

‘For …?’ Lucy couldn’t say it. She couldn’t say the words.

They looked at each other confused by the question. ‘Well … for us.’ He pointed at himself and the girl.

Lucy smiled.

Then the girl added, ‘A table for two, please.’ He looked at her proudly for saying that.

Lucy’s smile faded. ‘What’s the name?’

They looked at each other uncertainly again and he spoke. ‘Eh, Shane and Michelle.’

Lucy smiled again. ‘OK, Shane do you have a reservation?’

He looked shocked, ‘Ah, shit no. Did I need one?’

Michelle elbowed him in the ribs again and hissed, ‘I told ya to book it, ya eejit.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ Lucy said, studying the reservations. ‘I can give you a table, but we have a reservation for eight p.m. It’s six forty-five p.m. now, which doesn’t give you very much time,’ she explained.

Shane’s eyes widened. ‘Sure it never takes me more than an hour to eat me dinner at home.’

‘Fair enough.’ Lucy grinned. ‘Can I take your coats?’

Michelle looked at Shane uncertainly. ‘Eh, yeah,’ Shane finally decided for the two of them, and they peeled off their denim jackets. Lucy led them to their table in the centre of the dining room and handed them their menus.

She went around the tables lighting the candles. What was it about candles that was supposed to be romantic? Could a flickering flame add an atmosphere of love? Lucy wondered if a candle should be lit for a table for one, or, if one person sat down at a table for two, should she extinguish the flame? She of all people should know.

‘Excuse me,’ Shane called her as she passed.

‘Yes, sir,’ Lucy smiled.

‘“Sir”!’ He looked at Michelle and laughed. She giggled too. He pointed at the menu, ‘What’s a whores devvers?’

Lucy smiled. ‘Sir, the hors d’oeuvres on the menu are a selection of appetizers.’

‘Oh.’ Shane reddened. ‘Well we won’t have that, then, we’ll both just have steak and chips.’ They both looked nervous.

‘It’s not on the menu, though,’ Michelle added quickly.

‘I’m sure that won’t be a problem,’ Lucy said, taking their menus. ‘How would you like your steak cooked?’

They looked at each other again. ‘Eh, fried?’ Shane spoke up.

Lucy bit her lip. ‘Rare, medium or well done?’

‘Oh.’ He reddened. ‘Well done.’

‘The same,’ Michelle said quietly.

Lucy never had anyone to learn things with like Shane and Michelle. Together they were going for a meal by themselves for what appeared to be the first time. They were learning about new foods, the different language used and how to speak up and ask for things themselves. Lucy had never shared moments like that with anyone. Everything she had learned was by herself. Of course she had been out on dates and had boyfriends but none of them were long-term and none of them helped her discover anything new about the world or about herself. Apart from the fact that they didn’t love her and that she didn’t love them.

She scanned the restaurant. There were ten tables for two so far with ages ranging from sixteen to sixty. All different kinds of love: new love, old love, stolen love, couples sitting in silence, others unable to keep their hands off each other, some in serious conversation, some laughing loudly. Lucy’s eyes filled again and she scanned the reservations hoping for no more tables for two.

Clarke x 6.

Ha! Thank god, Lucy thought, the mist clearing from her eyes.

But when the six arrived she realized it was three couples, and there was nothing worse than a couple in love except three couples in love. The words table for two echoed and bounced around her lonely head as she overheard snippets of fights, tears, laughter and love from each table. Surrounded by crowds of people all night, never physically being alone but all the time feeling it.

Standing at reception, she heard the door open and close. Her heart dropped. She was tired, her eyelids were drooping and her feet and back were sore. How could the positive energy of so much love in the room drag her down so much?

‘Welcome, sir.’ Her colleague stepped in for her as she made herself busy by crossing out reservations and updating the sheet.

‘Hello. A table for one, please.’

And there it was. The voice she had so desperately needed to hear. The voice of a stranger that would lift her out of her dark spell. Her head shot up, her eyes twinkling with happy tears. She was faced with a man aged what she would guess to be in his mid- to late thirties.

He looked her way and gave her a small smile. He wore a long navy-blue cashmere coat, with a brown Burberry scarf wrapped around his neck. His hands looked cold as he rubbed them together and glanced around the restaurant. Lucy’s heart danced with delight at the man’s request. A young man. Ordinary-looking. No rings on his fingers. A table for one! He had said it proudly, strongly, as if there was nothing at all wrong with it. Lucy loved to hear it roll off his tongue. She wanted to hear it again. A table for one! Halleluiah!

‘I’m sorry, sir, if you don’t have a reservation I’m afraid we can’t accommodate you,’ her colleague apologized.

‘What?’ Lucy snapped, her head turning to face her colleague. It was as if the record she was dancing to in her head had abruptly scratched to a stop.

‘Lucy,’ he hissed, pulling her away from the desk and out of earshot of the gentleman. ‘What are you doing?’

‘We have one table free,’ she defended herself. She pointed down the restaurant at it. There it was by the window with a beautiful view of the park.

‘That’s a table for two,’ her colleague said, dismissing her. ‘We’ll fill that by the end of the night.’ He took a step back towards the desk to the man.

‘We’ll fill it now,’ Lucy said far louder and sharper than she had intended.

‘Excuse me one moment, sir.’ Her colleague spun around on his heel with a face like thunder, ‘What are you doing? he hissed. ‘Are you mad? We’ll make more money with a table for two.’

More money. Lucy’s eyes filled with tears. ‘No.’ Her voice shook quietly. No, she couldn’t let this happen. She couldn’t let being alone lose out to being in love. While she was lost in thought she heard the door open, she looked up and saw a couple approaching them.

‘A table for two, please.’ The man smiled.

‘Do you have a reservation? her colleague asked.

‘No, we don’t.’ They smiled stupidly at each other. ‘This was all very last-minute.’ They gazed into each other’s eyes, their fingers entwined.

‘Certainly, allow me to take your coats.’ He held out his hands and said very softly to the lone man still waiting at the desk. ‘I’m very sorry, sir, we’re fully booked.’

Tears spilled over the brim of Lucy’s eyes. She felt the warm salty water run down her cheeks and drip from her chin. No one noticed her. No one ever did.

She just rattled along, shuddering occasionally through life, doing the same routine, helping people, bringing them from A to B but never joining them, stopping and starting, starting and stopping. Never being allowed to go her own pace or change route.

Well not this time. She dried her eyes.

‘Excuse me, sir?’ she called out loudly to the man pulling the door open.

He stopped and turned.

‘There seems to be a mistake,’ she said politely to the couple before her. ‘This man was here before you and he will be seated at our last table. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, but my colleague was confused.’ She smiled sympathetically at them.

Her colleague’s jaw dropped and he was faced with the awkward situation of apologizing to the couple.

‘Allow me to take your coat, sir,’ Lucy said, eyes shining as she held her hand out to take the lone gentleman’s coat.

He took her hand in his, it was warm. ‘Thank you,’ he said softly. Lucy blushed.

‘You’re welcome,’ she whispered back.

She took his coat, led him to his table, handed him the menu and lit the candle in the centre of the table.

That night, on the 14th of February, the day she always hated, thirty-year-old Lucy fell in love for the first time, with the man at the table for one.

It quickly became a table for two.

4 The Calling

‘Seven and eight, seventy-eight.’

Her age.

Mags threw her eyes up to heaven and grumbled under her breath, in her raspy voice.

‘What’s that love?’ Agatha shouted, moving her ear closer to Mags’s head. ‘You’re going to have to speak up, love, it’s me deaf ear you’re sittin’ beside.’

Mags wrinkled her nose up in disgust as she watched the black wiry hairs clinging to Agatha’s chin bounce up and down as her mouth opened and shut. Her teeth became loose from her palette and were quickly clamped back into place as Agatha’s bloodshot, tired, grey eyes darted around the table to see if anyone had noticed.

Mags threw her eyes up again and mumbled questioningly to the Good Lord.

‘Wha’?’ Agatha’s blue rinse brushed off Mags’s forehead as she leaned in to hear. Mags shook her head and swatted Agatha’s head away as though it were a fly. She concentrated on what was going on ahead of her again.

‘Two and two, twenty-two.’ The year she was born.

She gritted her teeth and exhaled loudly. She leaned slightly to the left in her chair to sneak a glance at how her neighbour was progressing. The woman slowly raised her hand and covered her card. Mags raised her eyes slowly from the wrinkled hand blotched with brown patches, and came face to face with a tight smile.

Mags cleared her throat awkwardly, sat upright in her seat and tried to look insulted as she covered her own card with her hand as if to accuse her neighbour of cheating. The woman grunted and pulled her chair away from Mags. The steel chair legs, which had long lost their rubber grips, screeched along the tired oak floor. Faces winced and looked up. Her neighbour’s face reddened and became buried in her hand as pained expressions stared at the cause of all the noise. Mags ‘hmmphed’ loudly as though she had been victorious in that particular round.

‘WHAT’S EVERYONE LOOKIN’ SO MOANY FOR, MAGS?’ Agatha shouted, while looking around confused. ‘DID SOMEBODY FART?’ She sniffed the air and moved her head around animatedly, not wanting to be left out of the group’s obvious discomfort. ‘I CAN’T SMELL IT, MAGS,’ she shouted again. ‘IS IT AWFUL? IT MUST BE AWFUL.’ She sniffed the air one last time, then shook her head, looking defeated. ‘CAN’T GET IT OVER HERE AT ALL.’

‘AAGH! JAYSUS, I’M DEAF, NOT NUMB, MAGS. WHAT’S WRONG WIT’ YA?’ She looked at her friend with a horrified expression while rubbing her sore side.

‘Would you ever shut your trap, Aggie O’Brien,’ she hissed.

‘WHA’?’ Agatha yelled, moving her head closer to Mags.

Mags stared at the blue-rinse mound of curls that had been shoved in her face and tutted at the patches of pink skin that were visible through the thin wispy hair. After not hearing a reply, Aggie turned to face Mags in order to read her lips. The two thin red lines were pursed, the deep cracks in her skin gathering around her mouth as though being pulled by a drawstring. A crooked finger stood perpendicular to her lips with a bright-red nail ordering her to, Stop!

‘Sshh!’ was all Aggie could just about make out. Then she realized what her friend meant.

‘OH JAYSUS, SORRY, MAGS,’ she yelled a little less loudly but not so much that the surrounding tables couldn’t hear. ‘I DIDN’T REALIZE IT WAS YOU THAT DONE IT. SURE I CAN’T EVEN SMELL IT MESELF AND I’M RIGHT BESIDE YOU.’

Mags’s cheeks pinked as they always did when she was embarrassed, looked as though she had dabbed two balls of baby-pink blusher onto her cheekbones. Her father used to say she was as pretty as the pink carnations that grew in her mother’s flower garden of their country home. A circus clown, her mother had always used to rant angrily as though the very vision of them offended her. Her mother would cover her face in clouds of white powder before Mags would head out to the local dance on a Friday night. No daughter of hers would find a man with awful pink cheeks on her face, especially not her only daughter. The bristles of the powder brush used to scrape away at Mags’s cheeks, causing her eyes to water and her irritated skin to redden even more. Faster and faster her mother would brush, nearly scraping the layer of skin away so it would reveal pure whiteness. The angrier and angrier she would get, the redder and more sore-looking her daughter’s face would become.

Twice a week Mags would have to endure this. Once on a Friday before the local dance and again on the Sunday morning before they walked along the potholed road to eight o’clock mass. Mags would have to sit for an hour for her mother while she tied up her hair and powdered her face. Mags wondered why she couldn’t just dip her face into the bowl of flour her mother left sitting on the kitchen counter in preparation for the Sunday homemade apple tart. At least that way not a pink blotch would be in sight.

She would be ordered to sit still, afraid to move a muscle in case she felt the sharp sting of the back of the brush against her flesh, which inevitably caused her cheeks to turn rosy. It was a vicious circle. So she sat tight, hands on lap, back straight (‘A man wouldn’t want a wife with bad posture now, would he, Margaret?) while her five brothers could remain in bed for the extra hour. Mags often felt like questioning her mother on why it was that men didn’t need to make the same effort for women. Mags certainly had no desire for a man who smelled of cow manure, sweat thick with the stench of stale black coffee, muddy big black boots with faded trousers and dried muck in the creases, tucked into their thick black socks (no doubt darned by their mothers and sisters) all held up by a pair of braces. Mags was convinced that the only reason for these was so the men would have a place to rest their thumbs while they stuck their chests out and strolled the town as if they hadn’t a care in the world.

Mags had sometimes wished, while sitting for her mother, that she had been born a man. There were few or no rules, fewer expectations and what appeared to be no pressures apart from watching the weather and worrying about the amount of milk they could get from the cow that morning. But she wouldn’t dare share these thoughts with her mother, especially while she had the spiky brush in one hand and a lock of her black silky hair firmly grasped in the other. Mags doubted her mother would have a problem scalping her in an instant; however, the only thing that held her back was the knowledge that a bald patch on a girl is not easy on the watchful eye of a hot, red-blooded young male. No, the hair remained untouched—it was pulled at and twisted, knotted and pinched, but remained unscalped.

Once ready, her mother would call the boys. Mags would hear them mumbling and grumbling and moaning about having to get up at such an early hour. Mags would stare desperately in the mirror at her reflection, her powdery white face appearing ghostlike against the whitewashed walls of her bedroom in the background. While her mother banged around the boys’ bedroom, pulling open curtains and laying out clothes, laughing and pretending to be angered by their protests but secretly loving the attention, Mags sucked in her cheeks, widened her eyes and pretended to float around like the ghost she felt like. It was as though her mother wanted her to be invisible and it wasn’t only the makeup that made Mags feel it.

Her father, when he wasn’t at the pub or working the farm, doted on her. Her mother despised her for it. But he wasn’t one to argue with the woman he married, and, sure, didn’t she know best how to treat a growing young woman when she herself was one? One thing Mags loved him to disagree with was all the makeup she wore going to see The Lord in His House. ‘Our Lord doesn’t need nor require young Margaret to wear a mask in his home, Grainne.’

‘Ah, yes, but our Lord does want young Margaret to find a suitor so she doesn’t grow old a shamed woman. And unless the Lord requires her to be a nun there is no need for her to be without a man. The world isn’t designed for a woman without a man and as far as we know she hasn’t received the Calling.’

Her parents and five brothers had all stopped walking at that point to stand still and stare at Mags. Her cheeks flushed instantly and her mother let out an exasperated sigh as though Mags was deliberately acting out against her mother’s hard work.

Mags gulped and stared back at her family wide-eyed. ‘What is it?’ she stammered.

Her mother shook her head sadly at the lack of grace of her daughter.

‘Have you received the Calling?’ Jackie, her twenty-year-old brother had asked her with a smirk on his face.

‘Margaret! Margaret!’ Her younger brother had called her name playfully in the background.

To Mags’s surprise, her mother started laughing and then immediately smacked her son over the head with her handbag for joking about the Lord. Only Mags’s father watched her face curiously.

‘Em, no, I haven’t,’ Mags whispered in embarrassment. He simply nodded his head once as he absorbed this information and then continued on walking. The rest of the family trudged on after him, overtaking Margaret, whose feet remained firmly fixed to the spot with pure terror and shame. She knew what they were all thinking: if she hadn’t received a calling like Kathleen from down the road and she hadn’t courted a man at the age of twenty then maybe she was one of those ‘funny ones’ that cut their hair short and moved to the city.

‘Hurry along, Margaret,’ her mother had spat angrily, even more disappointed. ‘The Lord waits for no one, especially not twenty-year-old girls who dilly-dally.’

Margaret’s heartbeat quickened at her mother’s tone and she ran to catch up with her family.

‘Sorry,’ she had whispered to their backs as they walked ahead of her. And she had meant it. Sorry she wasn’t more like them. Sorry she lacked the social graces of her mother, the personality of her father, the popularity of her brothers, the beauty of all the other girls in the town.

They arrived at the church at 7.30 in the morning, as they did every week, and gathered with the rest of the congregation for the next half-hour. Mags hated the way the women gossiped about that week’s scandal, hated how her mother pretended not to be interested even though Mags knew she looked forward to those chats all week more than the mass itself. The men would talk about the weather and how it was affecting the crop. Mags loved when the weather was good because her father became a whole new man. They would stay up until all hours listening to his stories and listening to his songs, but when the farm wasn’t going well it felt to Mags as though there was a stranger in the house. He became an intruder who conversed in only grunts and monosyllabic words and appeared only at eating time. A man she didn’t much like.

Finally, the gossip would end when the church bell signalled eight o’clock. They would all pile into the church, which would quickly become packed to the brim with hung-over men, crying children, coughing teenagers, women hiding their yawns out of respect for the ‘Good Lord’ in case he struck them down for such an act of humanity. Mass for Mags was a real-life cattle mart. Her mother would herd the family down the aisle, Mags would walk towards the crucifix to hisses in her ear of ‘Watch your posture, Margaret’ or ‘Look happy for Our Lord, Margaret’ until they reached their usual spot in the front row.

Mags knew now it was no more for Our Lord than for the mice in the field, it was for the rows of young single men who lined the outer aisles, backs against the cold, white, stone walls, thumbs tucked into their braces, wandering eyes staring back at her under floppy fringes. There was one man in particular her mother had her eye on. She tried to convince her Mags it was for her of course but Mags had her suspicions. Her mother became another woman when he was around, laughing at his jokes, being shockingly polite and being far too interested in what the young man had to say for Margaret’s liking. Ploughing a field really wasn’t that comical in Margaret’s opinion and her mother never seemed as enthusiastic to listen when her father talked about it. Seamus O’Reilly was his name, a local who worked on his father’s farm and who probably would be doing the same for the next fifty years of his life. He was twenty-five years of age, strong as an ox, great with his hands and a ‘decent sort of a lad’, according to her father.

He reminded Mags of her five brothers with his cheeky smile and overconfident stroll. She could see him demanding food on the table, hot water for his bath and freshly washed clothes every morning just like the boys. He leaned against the confessional box and watched all the single girls from the village being led in a neat line up the aisle by their mothers. The stone floor beneath his feet was scattered with muddy clumps as the muck on the soles of his leather boots dried, cracked and fell to the floor. So Mags felt far from upset when she watched him walk down the aisle with Katie McNamara that year. As all the women had watched the bride and gasped in awe at her dress as she passed, Mags had more interest in watching the soles of Seamus’s feet as he walked away out of the church a married man. Her suspicions had been correct. The mud cracked and fell with every step. To Mags, an obvious sign of what future lay ahead for poor Katie McNamara.

Mags wanted to find a man with shiny shoes, a man who didn’t sweat for a living. If such a creature existed in Kilcrush.

Her mother had been visibly devastated and had dabbed at her eyes throughout the wedding ceremony, claiming to be ‘so happy for Seamus and Katie’ between sniffles. Mags didn’t think it was her posture or her smile or her hair or her walk or her conversation or any of the other things her mother claimed it was that drove him away. Mags didn’t think Seamus even cared about any of those things. He had explained to Grainne that it was Katie’s ‘healthy glow’ that did it for him. Mags had wanted to grab her mother by the hands and dance and twirl her around the room when she heard that. For, much as she hated that brush scraping the powder onto her skin, it removed the healthy glow that could have imprisoned her in Seamus’s farmhouse.

But, despite her joy at not been chosen by the best boy in the village, it left Mags still a single woman at twenty and, much as her parents prayed for it, Mags’s Calling never came. Not of the sort they wanted, anyway.

Agatha’s sniffing the air brought Mags’s mind back to the present, ‘I STILL CAN’T GET IT, MAGS, SO DON’T WORRY.’

Mags rolled her eyes. ‘There is no smell, Aggie.’

‘HA?’ Agatha yelled squinting her eyes in concentration as though doing so would help her hear. ‘There is no smell. Nobody farted, Aggie. Now stop screaming.’ She raised her voice a little more.

‘IT’S ME BAD EAR, MAGS, WHA?’ Agatha shouted.

That did it. Mags’s blood boiled. She was sick and tired of having to repeat herself, and, not only that, her voice was sore at having to shout at Aggie all day every day. If they weren’t careful Aggie would be deaf and Mags would be dumb from having to raise her voice. ‘THERE IS NO SMELL, AGGIE, OK? I. DID. NOT. FART.’

Agatha jumped, the announcer on stage was silenced and a few chuckles were heard around the hall. Mags’s cheeks went pink again and she thought immediately of how angry her mother would be, just as she had been programmed to.

‘Eh … four and four, farty-four, I mean forty-four, excuse me,’ the bingo caller stuttered.

The hall erupted in laughter and Mags snorted. She quickly grabbed her nose to stop it from happening again. Agatha looked around the room confused and turned to stare at her friend with her hand over her nose. ‘DON’T TELL ME YOU DID IT AGAIN, MAGS. IN THE NAME OF JAYSUS ARE YOU TRYIN’ TO KILL US ALL?’ Agatha yelled, sounding exasperated. This time her words weren’t heard by quite so many people over the sound of all the laughter.

Mags tried to control herself, not wanting to be seen to be enjoying herself at the weekly bingo. She liked to think that it was now something she had to do for her friend Aggie and refused to accept the notion that she looked forward to the few hours every week she spent in the local school hall. Her life was far too interesting to be excited by bingo because … well, that would make her old.

And she wasn’t old.

She was seventy-eight. All the same, she couldn’t wait to tell her Connie when she left the bingo hall. How he would have laughed his heart out at this. Oh, yes, there was a man in the end. Cornelius Kelly was his name and Mags adored that man with all her heart. Still did. She couldn’t wait to tell this story to him.

The bingo caller tried to recover from his embarrassment and when the giggles had died down in the hall he resumed his job. ‘Four and three, forty-three.’

Mags smiled. The year she met her Connie.

She had found a man all right. A real man, not one of those ones her mother kept trying to pair her off with, either. She hadn’t wanted to marry a dirty local and have to spend the rest of her life tending for his every unnecessary need. She wanted to fall in love, she wanted to work—and not the kind of work that involved scrubbing clothes and dishes, sewing socks and buttons and cooking. She wanted to work outside of a house.

So she left Kilcrush in the west of Ireland and headed to Dublin City. The big smoke. Her mother and father had been horrified at the very idea when she told them one evening that she was going to join her best friend from school, who had moved up the previous year. Her mother had been convinced she was one of the ‘funny ones’ and no daughter of hers was going to hang around the likes of her in a city full of sin. Dublin City, they said, was not designed for a single woman.

Her parents wouldn’t hear of it.

So she didn’t tell them.

With the money she had saved from selling eggs from the hen her father had given her for her twenty-first (and selling the hen) and a small amount of farm produce at the local market, she bought a train ticket and disappeared into the night. Standing on the pavement on O’Connell Street, she took in the sights, sounds and smells that her new life had to offer. She stared with delight in the great big windows of Clerys department store and had a pain in her neck from standing at the foot of the large granite structure and looking up at Nelson’s Pillar, which she had previously only ever seen in photographs. She breathed in the smoke, the noise, the crowds, the buildings, the trams, so much concrete and such little green—she loved it.

She moved in with her friend Agatha O’Reilly from school to a dark, dingy bedsit in the heart of the city. It was dirty and grotty, noisy and smelly and within days it felt like home to Mags. She took to life very quickly in Dublin. She loved the freedom, she loved being able to go to eleven o’clock mass on a Sunday morning (or Saturday night if she so wished), where she could wear her hair any way she liked it, go barefaced, sit in the back row and yawn to her heart’s content without being struck down by the Lord. She worked Monday to Friday as a chambermaid in a city hotel near the bedsit and she tried to save every shilling she made and stashed it in a box under her bed. She planned to create the best life for herself.

One night the sweet, sweet music that filtered up through the floor of their bedsit from the smoky club below made Mags and Aggie sit up in bed and listen. The voice of an angel accompanied by the tinkling sound of a piano flowed like warm silky caramel through their ears. Mags closed her eyes and pictured herself and Fred Astaire dancing around the room. It was music so unlike anything she had heard in real life. This was the stuff she saw and heard only in the movie theatres she went to occasionally with Aggie. It wasn’t like ‘The Fields of Athenry’, which she was used to hearing sung in the pubs and at parties at home. There was no screeching fiddle or banging bodhrán, there were just silky soothing sounds that made her feel as if she was a million miles from home.

Every weekend she was transported to New York City, to a smoke-filled jazz club full of sophisticated, strong, beautiful, confident women, with big made-up eyes, rich sparkling jewels and glitzy dresses that revealed more flesh than any man in Mags’s home town dared to even dream about due to the fear of having to confess immoral thoughts. The kind of woman that inhaled sexily on a cigarette balanced effortlessly between gloved fingers, not a hint of their bright-red lipstick left behind on the cigarette tip. They would laugh flirtatiously as they tipped the ash into the tray right on target without even looking while sipping on a Cosmopolitan, being adored by men, envied by other women, not a care in the world.

Every Friday and Saturday night Mags and Aggie would become those women in the privacy of their own bedsit while they let the music take them away and let the noises from below make them feel as if they were in the very room. They would doll themselves up to the nines in their Sunday best, flicking cigarette ash around the room, revealing so much flesh their parents would be saying decades of the rosary. She lived life happily in a city not designed for single women.

The voice called out to her louder and louder week after week until Mags finally felt confident enough to leave the safety of her bedsit in order to explore downstairs. And when she left the room that night she left the Margaret Divine of Kilcrush behind her. For on stage performing was an angel, the stage spotlight acting as a beam from heaven shining on the man who sang as though he were from another world. His eyes sparkled at her as his magic hands glided gracefully over the keys, and he sang with a smile. A smile all for her. He just seemed to glow to Mags; she could hardly take her eyes away from him, couldn’t stop listening to his voice. There was an air of sophistication about him and at the age of twenty-one Mags knew she had already fallen in love with the voice of an angel, and now she had fallen in love with the man. It had been the Calling she had been praying for. His voice calling her to leave her safety net behind and come downstairs.

He was smart and friendly and funny and listened to Mags’s stories, laughed at her jokes, seemed interested in her opinions, made her feel loved and intelligent and sexy, and this was all new to her.

They became engaged only weeks later and, as Mags’s parents still refused to visit her in Dublin, she embarked on the train journey to Kilcrush with her love. He made her feel strong, as if she could take on the world and perhaps even her mother.

And, for a woman who didn’t think much of city people and their ways, Mags had never seen her mother so uncomfortable and nervous, so well dressed; she had never seen the cottage look so clean, not even as clean as when the local priest visited. It was as though her mother thought royalty was among them. But Connie was a man of the world. He had seen countries, learned of things Grainne could never teach her daughter or preach to her friends. Mags was surprised to find her mother intimidated by this confident young man who looked at her daughter in a way she found uncomfortable.

While Cornelius became acquainted with the men in the living room, it was required of Mags to help prepare tea with her mother in the kitchen. Her first greeting was a slap across the face. ‘That’s what you get, Margaret Divine,’ her mother said breathlessly while rubbing her hand in her apron as if to try to rid herself of the guilt of the act. ‘That’s what you get for not obeying me, for running off and becoming a scorned woman who hangs around smoky clubs with men like you were some sort of fancy woman,’ she hissed. ‘That’s not the life you were reared to know, not the life your father and I worked hard to provide for you, and this is how you repay us?’ She busied herself making sandwiches, slicing the tomatoes with neat precision, almost obsessive behaviour.

Mags stared at her mother, her eyes glistening from the sting of the slap.

‘Well, Margaret, what have you to say for yourself?’ She stopped slicing the tomato and turned to face Mags, sharp knife in one hand, other hand on hip trying to appear menacing. Margaret saw her then for the first time, for what she really was. A woman who knew very little about the real ways of the world. She realized that the woman who scared her all of her life knew very little at all. Margaret began to laugh, to her own surprise, quietly at first, but then she reached to the very bottom of her soul and found a loud bellyaching laugh that made her eyes run with tears of sadness and relief. This unusual act of disobedience angered her mother even more, and Mags received an even harder slap on the other cheek.

This stopped her laughing immediately but her eyes still glistened with bitter amusement.

‘What have you to say for yourself, young lady?’ her mother said angrily through gritted teeth. Loose grey hairs flailed around wildly as though they celebrated their escape from the tight bun in her head. Her face aged in an instant in Mags’s eyes, sharp knife aimed pointedly at Mags’s face. ‘Well?’ she pressed, the delight of putting her daughter back in her place causing her shoulders to relax a little. Margaret glanced at the small mirror over the kitchen basin, at the small wooden stool that she was forced to sit on for all of her teenage years twice weekly and endure the pain of covering her flushed cheeks. She didn’t know what to say. Margaret caught her reflection in the mirror and her stinging cheeks slowly broke into a sad smile. ‘Why Mother, you seem to have made my cheeks rosy.’

Her comment was greeted with an icy stare. But a shocked one at that. No words came from her mother’s mouth. And, as the unusual silence hung in the air, Margaret turned her back and walked out of the kitchen, out of the cottage and out of the place where her mother had tried to hold such control over her.

She and Cornelius married a few weeks later in a small church in Dublin. Her mother could not bring herself to attend but, for the last time, Mags’s father led her down the aisle of the church, with makeup on her face, up to the front row.

‘Four and seven, forty-seven.’

Mags smiled. The year she and Connie had their first baby.

He had been like an excited child himself when he found out about the pregnancy. He had picked her up and danced her around the living room of their new home, then quickly put her down again with worry, afraid of hurting her and the baby. They had finally managed to gather the money together to buy their first home in a new housing estate of brand-new three-bedroom homes in Cabra, Dublin. They had spent the first few years of their married life working all the hours under the sun to help pay for the house, and now they would have an addition. Mags smiled again. She couldn’t wait to talk to Connie later about the day they moved in. She loved doing that. Going over the memories of years gone by with him.

They named their first son Michael after Connie’s father, and over the following years they had three more children. Two more boys, Robert and Jimmy, and one girl, Joyce. A daughter Mags allowed to dress, act and speak for herself just as she pleased. They were all married now. Only Joyce lived in Dublin, the rest were living overseas with their families. They tried to get home as much as they could. Their eldest was now fifty-three years old. Not a baby any more.

‘On its own, number eight.’

The number of her grandchildren.

She couldn’t wait to finish up here and talk to Connie. She still loved him with all of her heart and every time she thought of him butterflies fluttered around her tummy. He used to work at the bingo hall until a few years ago, when the arthritis in his hands became too bad. He had missed playing the piano so much and Mags missed listening to him as she played her bingo. It was nice to hear his familiar sounds in the background and she liked being able to look up and watch him when he didn’t know she was looking. His face furrowed in concentration as he played the tunes he had been playing for over fifty years. They had never been able to find a replacement piano player. But there was no one near as good as Connie anyway …

Her thoughts diminished as she stared down at her card.

‘Oh,’ she said quietly with surprise.

‘Wha’?’ Aggie yelled.

Mags smiled at her lifelong friend. ‘I got bingo, Aggie.’ She clapped her hands together with glee.

‘You got wha’?’

‘Bingo, Aggie.’ She rolled her eyes. Here she goes again.

‘Ha?’

‘For the fiftieth time, I said I got Bingo! she yelled, the veins in her forehead throbbing from the volume of her voice.

The room stopped what they were doing and stared at her. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Ms Divine,’ the bingo caller said, startled. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t hear you the first time. Would you like to come up and collect your prize? You’ve won ten euro. Everybody give Mags a round of applause.’

Mags’s cheeks blushed as she slowly stood up from her chair and made her way shakily up to the stage. Her hip was at her again. Wait till Connie heard all her good news today, she thought happily, accepting the crisp ten-euro note.

Mags said her goodbyes to Aggie, eventually settling on just a wave after Aggie had questioned Mags’s ‘goodbye’ over and over again. Glowing from her win, she stopped at her local newsagent and bought a small bouquet of flowers, €1.99 for a bunch. She opened the gate and walked up the path to her husband. Seeing him in the distance, she started to explain. ‘Oh, Connie, you’ll never believe the day I’ve had. I won ten euro in the bingo and poor old Aggie accused me of farting in front of everyone.’ Mags laughed at the memory. ‘Well these are for you,’ she said, thrusting the pretty flowers towards him. She placed them on the grass of her husband’s grave. ‘I miss you, love,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I miss you so much. This life’s not designed for old single women at all.’

5 The End

Let me tell you what this story is about before I get into the finer details. That way you can decide whether you want to read it or not. Let this first page be like my synopsis. First of all, let me tell you what this story is not: this is not an ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ story; it’s not about lifelong friendships, the importance of female relationships; there are no scenes of ladies whispering and sharing stories over cups of coffee and plates of cream cakes they swore to themselves and their weekly Weight Watchers class they wouldn’t eat. Drunken giggles over cocktails do nothing to dry the tears or save the day in this story.

What if I told you that this story won’t warm the cockles of your heart, it won’t give you hope or cause you to blame escaping tears on the sun cream as you lie by the pool reading this? What if I told you that the girl doesn’t get the guy in the end?

Knowing exactly how it ends, do you still want to read on? Well it’s not as if we don’t venture into things without knowing the end, is it? We watch Columbo knowing his misguided representation of himself as a foolish old man will help him solve the case; we know Renée Zellweger decides that she will be the one to go with Tom Cruise and the fish in Jerry Maguire every single time we watch it; Tom Hanks always sees Meg Ryan at the end of Sleepless in Seattle; James Bond always gets the girl; in EastEnders every once-happy marriage will end in death, destruction or despair; we read books knowing that the character will blatantly and predictably fall in love with the guy as soon as his name is first mentioned—but we still watch them and read them. There’s no twist in my story. I genuinely mean it when I say it, I do not live happily ever after with the love of my life, or anyone else for that matter.

It was my counsellor’s idea for me to write this story. ‘Try to keep an air of positiveness,’ she kept telling me. ‘The idea for this is to enable you to see the hopefulness of your situation.’ Well, this is my fifth draft and I’ve yet to have been enlightened. ‘End it on a happy note,’ she kept saying as her forehead wrinkled in concern while she read and reread my attempts. Well this is my last attempt. If she doesn’t like it she knows what she can do with it. I hate writing; it bores me, but these days it passes the time. I’m taking her advice, though: I’m ending this story on a happy note. I’m ending it at the beginning.

I’ll tell you, just as I told her, that my reason for doing so is that it’s always the beginnings that are the best. Like when you’re starving and it feels like you’ve been cooking dinner for hours, the smell is tickling your taste buds, making your mouth water, and it teases you until you take that first bite, that first beautiful bite that makes you feel like giggling ridiculously over the joy of having food in your mouth. You can’t beat the first relaxing slide into a warm bath filled with bubbles before the bubbles fade and the water gets cold, your first steps outside in a new pair of shoes before they decide to cut the feet off you, your first night out in a new outfit that makes you feel half the size, shiny and new before you wash it, the newness fades and it becomes just another item in your wardrobe that you’ve worn fifty times, the first half-hour of a movie when you’re trying to figure out what’s going on and not yet let down by the end, the first few minutes of work after a lunch break when you feel maybe you have just enough energy to make it through the day, the first few minutes of conversation after bumping into someone you haven’t seen for years before you run out of things to say and mutual acquaintances to talk about, the first time you see the man of your dreams, the first time your stomach flips, the first time your eyes meet, the first time he acknowledges your existence in the world.

The first kiss on a first date with a first love.

At the beginning, things are special, new, exciting, innocent, untouched and unspoiled by experience or boredom. And so it’s there that my story will end, for that is when my heart sat high in my chest like a helium-filled balloon. That is when my eyes were big, bright, and as innocently wide and as green as a traffic light all ready to go, go, go. Life was fresh and full of hope. And so I begin this story with the end.

The End

… Feeling desolate, I looked around the empty wardrobes, doors wide open, displaying stray hangers and deserted shelves as though taunting me. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. What had only moments ago been a room overflowing with sound and tension of pleas, of desperate begs for him not to leave, of sobs and squeals, wails and shouts coming from both sides was now a chamber of silence. Bags had been thrown around, violently unzipped, drawers were pulled open, clothes dumped into sacks, drawers banged shut, and zips making ripping sounds as they closed. More desperate begs.

Hands holding out and pleading to be held, hearts refusing, tears falling. An hour of mass confusion, never-ending shouts, boots heavily banging down the stairs, keys clanging on the hall table as they were left behind, front door banging. Then silence. Stunned silence.

The room held its breath, waited for the front door to open, for the softer surrendered sound of boots on the stairs to gradually become louder, for the bag to be flung on the ground, unzipped, drawers opened, to be filled and closed again.

But there was no sound. The door couldn’t open: the keys had been left behind. I slowly sat on the edge of the unmade bed, breath still held, hands in my lap, looking around at a room that had lost all familiarity with a heart that felt like the dark mahogany wardrobe, open wide, exposed and empty.

And then the sobs began. Quiet whimpering sounds that reminded me of when I was five years old, had fallen off my bicycle all alone and away from the safe boundaries of my home. The sobs I heard in the bedroom were the frightened sobs that escaped me as a child running home sore and scared and desperate for the familiar arms of my mother to catch me, save me and soften my tears. The only arms now were my own wrapped protectively around my body. My heart was alone, my pain and problems my own. And then panic set in.

Feelings of regret, gasps for breath in a heaving chest and hours of panic were spent dialling furiously, redialling, leaving tearful messages on an answering machine that felt as much as its owner. There were moments of hope, moments of despair, lights at the ends of tunnels shone, flickered and extinguished themselves as I fell back on the bed, the fight running out of me. I’d lost track of time, the bright room had turned to darkness. The sun had been replaced by the moon that had turned his back on me and guided people in the other direction. The sheets were wet from crying and the phone sat waiting to be called to duty in my hand, and the pillow still clung to his smell just as my heart clung to his love. He was gone. I untensed the muscles in my body and I breathed.

It was not supposed to end like this.

And so I won’t let it.

The Middle

… Oh, sweet joy, the joy of falling in love, of being in love. Those first few years of being in love, they were only the beginning. Twenty phone calls a day just to hear his voice, sex every night until the early hours of the morning, ignoring friends, favouring nights in curled up on the couch instead of going out, eating so much you both put weight on, supporting one another at family dos, catching roving eyes as they studied one another in secret, existing only in the world to be with them, seeing your future, your babies in their eyes, becoming a part of someone else spiritually, mentally, sexually, emotionally.

Nothing lasts for ever, they say. I didn’t fall in love with anyone else, nor did he. I’ve no dramatic story of walking in on him, in our bedroom with the skinny girl next door; I’ve no story to tell you of how I was romanced by someone else, chased and showered with gifts until I gave in and began an affair. You see, I couldn’t see anyone but him, and I know he couldn’t see anyone else but me. Maybe the dramatic stories would have been better, better than the very fact that living in a state of heartbreak, seemed more appealing to him than being with me.

We had one too many Indian takeaways on the couch together, had one too many arguments about emptying the dishwasher, I piled on one too many pounds, he refused one too many nights out with his friends, we went one too many nights falling asleep without making love and went one too many mornings waking up late, grabbing a quick coffee and running out of the door without saying I love you.

You see, it’s all that stuff at the beginning that’s important. The things that you do naturally. The surprise presents, the random kisses, the words of caring advice. Then you get lazy, take your eye off the ball, and before you know it you’ve moved to the middle stage of your relationship and are one step closer to the end. But you don’t think about all that at the time. When it’s happening, you’re happy enough living in the rut you’ve carelessly walked yourself straight into.

You have fights, you say things you definitely mean but afterwards pretend you don’t, you forgive each other and move on, but you never really forget the words that are spoken. The last fight we had was the one about who burned the new expensive frying pan; that’s the one that ended it. It stopped being about the frying pan after the first two minutes: it was about how I never listened, how his family intruded, about the fact he always left his dirty laundry on the floor and not in the basket, about how our sex life was nonexistent, how we never did anything of substance together, how crap his sense of humour was, how horrible a person I was, how he didn’t love me any more. Little things like that …

This fight lasted for days, I knew I hadn’t burned the frying pan, but he could bet his life on the fact he hadn’t even used it over that week, and of course he didn’t, seeing that I was the one who did the cooking around here, which according to him was ‘an admission to burning the pan’. Years of a wonderful relationship had turned to that? He went out both nights that weekend and so did I. It was like a competition to see who could come home later, who could ring less, who could be gone for the longer amount of time without contact, who could go longer without calling all their friends, family and police sick with worry. When you train yourself not to care, the heart listens.

One night I stayed out all night without telling him where I’d gone. I even turned my phone off. I was being childish; I was only staying in a friend’s house, awake all night turning my phone on and off checking for messages. Waiting for the really frantic one that would send me flying home and into his arms. I was waiting for the desperate calls, to hear ‘I love you’, to hear the sound of a man in love wanting to hang onto the best thing that had ever happened to him. As proof, as a sign that there was something worth holding onto. No such phone call came. That night taught us something. That I had stooped that low and that he hadn’t cared or worried as he should have.

We had an argument and he left. He left and I chased.

You know those moments at the end of movies when people announce their undying love in front of a gasping crowd? When there’s music, a perfect speech and then he smiles at you with tears in his eyes, throws his arms around your neck and everyone applauds, feeling as happy about the end result as you are? Well imagine if that didn’t happen. Imagine he says no, there’s an awkward silence, a few nervous laughs, and people slowly break away. He turns away from you and you’re left there with a red face cringing and wishing you’d never made that speech, taken part in the car chase, spent the money on flowers and declared your love in the middle of a busy shopping street in the lunch hour.

Well, where do you go from there? That’s something the movies never tell you. And not only is the moment embarrassing, it’s heartbreaking. It’s the moment when your best friend, the person who said he would love you for ever, stops seeing you as the person he wants and needs to protect. So much so that he can say no to you in front of the gathering crowd. It’s the moment that you realize absolutely everything you shared is lost because those eyes didn’t look at you as they should have and once did. They were the eyes of an embarrassed stranger shrugging off the begging words of an old lover.

A face looks different when the love is gone. It begins to look just how everyone else sees it, without the light, the sparkle—just another face. And the moment they walk away it’s as though the fact you know they sneeze seven times exactly at a quarter past ten every morning means nothing. As though your knowledge of their allergy to ginger and their penchant for dancing around in their underwear to Bruce Springsteen isn’t enough to hold you together. The little things you loved so much about a person become the little things they are suddenly embarrassed you know. All that while you’re walking away in that awkward, uncomfortable silence.

When you return home feeling foolish and angry to a house that’s being emptied you begin to wish all those dark thoughts away. I began to wish that we were still together and feeling miserable rather than having to go through goodbyes. He still felt part of me, I was still his, I was his best friend and he was mine, yet there was just the minor detail of not actually being in love with one another and the fact that any other kind of relationship just wasn’t possible. I begged and pleaded, he cried and shouted, until our voices were hoarse and our faces were tearstained.

Feeling desolate, I looked around the empty wardrobe with its doors wide open, displaying stray hangers and deserted shelves as though taunting me. It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

The Beginning

He used to get the same bus as I did. He got on one stop after me and got off one stop before. I thought he was gorgeous the very first day I spotted him outside after wiping the condensation from the upstairs window of the bus. It was dark, cold, raining, seven o’clock in the morning in November, in front of me a man slept with his head against the cold vibrating glass, the woman beside me read a steamy page of a romance novel, probably the cause of the fogged-up windows. There was the smell of morning breath and morning bodies on the stuffy bus, it was quiet, no one spoke, all that was audible was the faint sounds of music and voices from the earphones of Walkmans.

He rose from that staircase like an angel entering the gates of heaven. His hair was soaking, his nose red, droplets of rain ran down his cheeks and his clothes were drenched. He wobbled down the aisle of the moving bus sleepily, trying to make his way to the only free seat. He didn’t see me that day. He didn’t see me for the first two weeks, but I got clever, moving to the seat by the staircase where I knew he would see me. Then I took to keeping my bag on the chair beside me so no one could sit down and moving it only when he arrived at the top of the stairs so he could sit down. Eventually he saw me; a few weeks later he smiled; a few weeks on he said something; a few weeks later I responded. Then he took to sitting beside me every morning, sharing knowing looks, secret jokes, secret smiles. He saved me from the drunken man who tried to maul me every Thursday morning. I saved him from the girl who sang along loudly with her Walkman on Wednesday evenings.

Eventually, on the way home on a sunny Friday evening in May, he stayed on an extra stop, got off the bus with me and asked me to go for a drink with him. Two months later I was in love, falling out of bed last minute and running with him to the same bus stop most mornings. Sleeping on his shoulder all the way to work, hearing him say he had never loved anyone else in his life as he loved me, believing him when he said he would never fall out of love with me, that I was the most beautiful and wonderful woman he had ever met. When you’re in love you believe everything. We shared kisses that meant something, hearts that fluttered, fingers that clasped, and footsteps that bounced.

Oh, sweet joy, the joy of falling in love, of being in love. Those first few years of being in love, they were only the beginning.

6 The Production Line

I hated Christmas. Hated every damn song, the sound of the bells, the twinkling lights, every stupid movie and every happy face looking as if it should be stamped with a damn Hallmark sign. It was a time for people either happy or pretending to be. I was neither. So at 10.30 a.m. on 24 December I clocked in at work like any other day. The machine punched a hole through my docket, the sound punching a hole in my pounding head. I was over two hours late, but I didn’t care who saw me trudging down the halls dressed in the same clothes as yesterday stinking of beer, sweat and smoke and minus my uniform.

Last night had started off like every other night—a few innocent after-work drinks down at the local drinking hole with my colleagues. And it had ended just like every other night with everyone saying their goodbyes after a couple of drinks, but as usual I didn’t leave. I didn’t or couldn’t drag myself off that bar stool and I didn’t or couldn’t drag my lips away from the beer glass. I woke up this morning not knowing where the hell I was, once again with goddamn Thumper sitting on my head. You see, I had no family to go home to; no one to convince me that dragging myself away from that bar stool and beer glass was worthwhile.

I could smell the alcohol seeping from my pores and the stench of stale cigarette smoke clinging to my clothes as I walked down the hall to my workspace. I saw the faces, the glances, the nudges, the looks of disgust and the smiles of sympathy. I knew what they could see; I saw it every morning when I looked in the mirror: a sad old man letting it all slip away. But that didn’t scare me because at least I had a goal. I’d lost the most important things in my life and, if I kept on going the way I was going, I’d lose everything else. What a result, what an achievement, a triumph of perseverance. I was a perfect advertisement for what you could do when you really put your mind to it. And there was a certain amount of bravery that came with what I was doing, I believed. Not many people have the guts to throw absolutely everything away. They’re always stupid enough to hold onto something small, selfish enough to think that one thing could be a small comfort. But it’s not: it’s a reminder that you used to be somebody, that you used to belong to someone and they to you. If you’re going to do something, do it right, get rid of it all. The first thing I lost was my heart, everything after that was a cinch.

But who the hell works on 24 December? I hear you ask. Us, that’s who. We leave everything until the last minute and then have to work all hours to get the job done, every single year. The boss says we can’t start earlier because the clients don’t start ordering the goods until the run-up to Christmas. The others thrive on the manic times, I don’t. But I used to.

I work in a factory. A great, big, depressing, monstrous warehouse with no windows. I have a theory on the lack of windows: while we’re working, we can’t see how many hours have passed and the beauty of the changing day. That suits me just fine.

We’ve a boss who’s above us both geographically and mentally. He’s got an office way up at the top of the building with great big windows so he can look down on us all. Which he does. And I’ve been called up to that office once or twice and I see what he sees: hundreds of us working away like little ants, ready to be stomped on at any time.

In case you’re wondering what I do, I work on a production line. The factory makes toys, which is why we’re so busy at this time of the year. I say that it’s the factory that makes toys, not me: this Christmas all I was responsible for was sticking a plastic arm into a hole of the shoulder of some scary-looking doll with eyes so blue and dead I think I’m looking at myself. Happy Holly. That’s what they call her on the box. But I bet the kids wouldn’t touch her with a bargepole if they knew how she started out looking. When she gets to me she’s bald with no legs or arms, just a plastic torso and a head with eyes. This thing ends up singin’ and dancin’ and talkin’ and probably spittin’ if you want her to.

But every day for the past week I’ve been staring at this doll, been staring at those eyes dead and cold and thinking my development has worked in the opposite way to hers. I went from all-singin’ all-dancin’ to being a dead, cold, legless stump like her. It was as if someone had put me on that revolving table and sent me around while one by one people hammered me, pulled at me until I came out the other side feeling and looking like I do now. A conveyor belt surrounded by my ex-wife, kids, mother-in-law, brothers, sisters and whatever friends I had, all armed with their weapons. They’d all taken a jab at me and left me with cold, staring, blue eyes.

I took my place at the conveyor belt, apologized to the guy next to me who was red in the face and sweating from having to put two arms into two holes instead of just his usual one. But I bet he’d done it all while whistling. They all whistled while they worked here, wearing stupid-looking uniforms and working all day without a break. Not me, I don’t make a sound, I had the wind knocked out of me a long time ago.

I could see the boss standing at the window in his office looking at me. Glaring at me with his arms crossed over his fat belly, dressed in an expensive suit ready for his night’s work. We were all working overtime tonight. I hated him. I hated seeing him sitting up there doing nothing while we slaved away down here. I hated that he was the name and face of the company, that he reaped all the rewards, got all the glory and fame and had his picture plastered on every poster all over the world. I wasn’t jealous, no way, that’s not my nature. Not for one second did I want to be in his boots. But I hated him because he wouldn’t let me go.

He wouldn’t give up on me like everyone else had. It was as if we were having some kind of contest. How much could I push it before he sacked me, how much could he take before he would have no choice? I wouldn’t quit; if I was gonna lose everything it had to be taken from me, not given by me. I had a feeling he was just leaving me for the next selfish guy who took his job; I was the mess he didn’t want to have to clean up. He was retiring soon, getting away from all this damn snow and heading to the sun. So in the meantime I got to work later every day and missed a few Happy Holly dolls now and then.

Yesterday they had hundreds of them all packaged nice and pretty, ready to go out, until some guy realized that half of them had only one arm. I told them it would be more realistic to let the kids know that not everyone is born looking like some blonde princess with pretty dresses who did whatever you wanted her to do whenever you wanted. It was sending out the wrong message, I told them. But they didn’t go with my idea, instead they just took them all out of the boxes again and some fool whistled while he fixed the few hundred he wasn’t supposed to fix and wasn’t paid to fix. He didn’t care, just kept on with that happy tune while his dinner grew cold on the table, while his kids went to sleep without a goodnight kiss from their daddy and while his wife, who was getting angrier and angrier by the minute, was getting bored waiting for him and starting to look elsewhere.

And why’s he doin’ it? Because one fat man with a grey beard has given some screwed-up motivational speech about helping people all around the world and he fell for it. Got tied up thinking about kids he didn’t know and forgot about his own. I knew the story all too well.

I watched him hammering away and thought, That’s what I must have looked like before they sent me out on the conveyer belt. All enthusiastic and happy, packaged in bright colours designed to please the eye and heart. Ready and willing to do anything asked of me at the press of a button. Plastic.

I missed a few Happy Holly dolls while watching him, decided I couldn’t care less, sat back, lit up a cigarette and watched while those beady eyes rolled on by, seein’ nothin’ and hearin’ nothin’. Existing only in the world to please little beings who’d throw them around, drool on them, kick them, dirty them, leave them out in the rain and make them sit down and drink imaginary tea. Eventually they’d be forgotten about or lost.

The cigarette smoke sent a few whistles out of tune, that’s for sure, caused a few coughs. I looked up at the window at Big Brother and wondered when he was gonna give up. He slowly unfolded his arms, beckoned to me, calling me up. Ah, victory at last. I’d finally won. I’d lost absolutely everything.

I knocked on his door and entered. He was sitting in an expensive leather chair behind an expensive desk looking fat and rich and unhealthy. He looked at me with his twinkling blue eyes, rosy cheeks and a red nose—all the signs of someone who’d drunk far too much all his life.

‘Want me to sit on your knee, Nicholas?’ I asked sarcastically, taking a drag of my cigarette.

He laughed heartily. He wasn’t supposed to and that annoyed me. So I stood before him while he told me a story. A story about a man who worked so hard, cared so much about people he didn’t know, that he lost his family and friends, drank himself to oblivion, ate all the junk in the world and got a belly so big he could rest a cup of cocoa on it, and I stood there fuming because I thought he was talking about me. But it turned out to be his own story and he told me that he looked out that window every day at me and thought he was looking at himself in the mirror. A mirror with a time delay. I didn’t realize it at the time but it seemed that, watching him, I’d been looking in a mirror reflecting the future.

Later, after his retirement, from the windows of that very same office, I kept an eye on the enthusiastic hammerer and watched as he let it all slip away. He would be next. I changed my name, settled into my new job where obesity and unhealthiness was a virtue and where parents smiled and took photos when you put their kids on your knee. Suddenly, I was more welcome in every home around the world than I’d ever been in my own. I had a wonderful assistant, Mary, who made a list of my clients and I checked them twice.

I filled the boots of a great man and in turn became a great man. I may have lost everything I ever owned and loved, but in return I was given the world.

7 Celebrating Mum

A spoon tapping against a champagne glass silences the bubbles of conversations. Voices simmer and then calm.

My eldest son George takes his place at the head of the room, the ringmaster, as always, ready to direct proceedings. My husband, Fred, and I are surrounded by our entire world, cocooned by the generations we had a hand in creating. Fred and I sit beside one another, everybody else stands with a drink in their hand. I eye the quickly disappearing whiskey in the glass in Fred’s hand and vow, again, as I did as a young woman at the top of the altar over fifty years ago, to keep an eye on him tonight. I prepare to be spoken about as though I’m not here, the centre of attention for tonight. Oh, how I hate that, but they all mean well, I know.

‘I was trying to think when was the last time so many of us gathered together and I think it was again for Mum, when we celebrated her seventieth birthday three years ago,’ George begins.

Nods of agreement, memories flashing back, quiet murmuring.

‘She’s always been such an attention seeker, isn’t that right, Mum?’ Edward shouts out and everybody laughs.

‘Do you remember that birthday party, Greg?’ George calls to the baby of the family.

Forty years old this year, my baby Greg. I watch him fondly, at how his face reddens as they taunt him. Ever since the day they’d formed words on their tiny lips, they’d never stopped teasing. How cruel siblings can be. I’d always hated their carry-on as children and teens, each of them so precious to me that one insult flung at them would hit me ten times harder than it ever would them. But siblings are impenetrable, each mock only adds another layer of thickened skin. When should a mother step in? I questioned myself each time, for I’d end up doing more harm than good for the little one I was protecting. Mummy’s pet, they would chant then. No, I tried to stay well out of it and watched them instead with the eyes in the back of my head, hurting for them more than they could ever hurt, feeling tested more than they were testing one another. I still do now. Over forty years old, the lot of them, their tongues sometimes dripping with more venom than ever before. Old enough to know better, the more years they have, the more childish those words from their mouths sound.

They’re teasing Greg now about his behaviour at my seventieth-birthday party. He was up dancing on that floor all night, mostly on his own, inhaling helium from the heart-shaped balloons they’d arranged for me, and singing the Bee Gees. More was that performance a ‘Tragedy’ than the song, for his enjoyment will be a source of embarrassment for the rest of his life.

A surprise seventieth. Now there’s an oxymoron: never was there a day I knew was on the horizon more than that one. It’s not a number that creeps up and shouts boo! Life does slip by, it’s true, but I’m not so unobservant as not to notice or so numb as not to feel seventy years in this life. But a surprise seventieth-birthday party— now that was a shock. Have you ever heard anything like it? That was a great big boo! in my ear. Had my hearing aid been switched off I’d still have heard it. Lucky my seventy-year-old heart didn’t fail me when I was besieged as I entered the room. A few drinks with Betty and Frank, my you-know-what. Betty had barely been out of her bed for a month. Oh, but it was the best excuse Fred could think of to get me down to that pub. If it wasn’t for the state of his prostate, I’d have thought he had a little someone on the side. On the phone for an entire month before that party, he’d leave the room every time I walked in. Late at night I’d hear him whispering down the phone, and there’s me thinking he was organizing the new patio furniture from the magazine I’d left open on the table. But no, when they all jumped out at me from the dark, throwing streamers in my face and shouting, the surprise was on me. A moment I’ll never forget, and nor will they, for they’re still talking about it as my mind wanders.

‘I seem to recall not being alone on that dance floor, thank you very much,’ Greg defended himself. ‘Mum joined me for the moonwalk and we have the video footage to prove it.’

Ah, yes, we did. We’d had fun watching that at Christmas and every single Christmas since. They don’t drop a joke, my boys. Fred looks at me and smiles, remembering it all.

‘Hear what they’re saying about you, Mum?’ my daughter Louise calls out, and there are laughs all around.

I hear you, I hear you, I chuckle. Fred looks at me adoringly. Never stopped loving me for a moment. A second or two maybe, but never more than that.

‘Well you didn’t acquire your dance skills from Mum,’ Brendan shouts. Ah, Brendan. Always defending me. Even when I know I’m wrong.

‘A wonder on the dance floor,’ Fred says softly and takes my hand in his.

Oh, a wonder we were, from the bunny-hop to ballroom, the chicken dance to the cha-cha, the jig to the jive, we did them all. I dragged him to a dance class in the local community school one night forty years ago and since then he’d been dragging me around the dance floor every chance he got.

‘Never did get the handle on the tango,’ Fred says. No, we never did. Though we tried, and that’s what counts. Failed at a few things, me and him, but got through it all together, stronger at the end of it all.

‘They really were Fred and Ginger,’ George adds, and there are murmurs of agreement.

‘Why ginger?’ Sarah, my seven-year-old granddaughter, asks.

I laugh. All I am to her now is her grey-haired granny but to everyone else … I look around for someone else to answer the question for me.

‘Oh, your grandmother had bright-red fire-engine hair.’ Brendan speaks up on my behalf and I’m not surprised it’s him. ‘And when all the others on the dance floor saw her spinning their way they scattered right out of her way.’

Edward makes the sound of an ambulance and we all laugh. And then off they go discussing me again as though I’m not in the room. I’m sure I blush; I always have done. George may have got my red hair but Greg was cursed with my red cheeks. Louise? My only girl. I look to her and find she’s watching me, sadness in her eyes. I see the child in her again.

‘Well the things that stand out in my mind about you, Mum,’ George continues, ‘are your dancing, your graceful waltzes across the floor. You and Dad moving so fast no one could tell whose feet were whose.’

Murmurs of agreement.

‘And all those beautiful dresses you wore, too, and you’re wearing one of my favourites tonight.’

Oh, it’s my favourite, too, and Fred’s. He’s looking me up and down, still approvingly after fifty years. I swallow hard. There is plenty of discussion all around me now about which dress is whose favourite. An entire wardrobe of ball gowns, I made many of them myself but not the one I wear now. It’s gold-sequined and floor-length; worn the first time Fred and I got first place in the dance competition. I wear a pair of shoes to match. I can’t walk in them, not to mention dance in them, but I wear them all the same. I wear a gold slide in my silver hair with an emerald stone. Brings my eyes out, makes them sparkle, people always complimented. It’s not the slide that does it, I’d always say, it’s the man that gave it to me. He liked that.

‘A fondness for blueberry muffins also features strongly when I think of you, Mum,’ Greg carries on.

I laugh, and so does everybody else.

‘It’s not so much the blueberry muffins that stand out in my mind, it’s the twenty minutes spent taking the blueberries out before eating them that’s particularly memorable.’

‘The same with scones,’ Louise pipes up.

‘Is that so? I didn’t know,’ George laughs.

Fred looks at me and laughs. ‘Oh, you and your muffins and scones, love.’

‘What about her ironing Dad’s handkerchiefs?’ Edward calls out, and I have to chuckle again.

‘Every time I walk into that bloody house, she’s ironing Dad’s dirty handkerchiefs. For what? To end up scrunched in a ball in his pockets anyway!’

Fred takes a white crumpled handkerchief out of his pocket and waves it around the room.

‘He surrenders!’ Brendan shouts, and they all laugh again.

‘Her knock-knock jokes!’ Louise shouts out.

‘Awful!’ Edward calls.

‘Oh, they’re not so bad.’ Brendan brings it back down again. Typical Brendan.

‘Your homemade brown bread,’ Louise says softly, and I hear mmmmm’s of delight.

‘Your driving,’ Edward says, and there’s laughter. ‘Every day a new bump or scratch on that car.’

Fred and I laugh, knowing that a good driver I am not.

‘Always blaming somebody else,’ Louise laughs.

The room erupts, and I cringe. A good liar I am not.

Fred finishes his whiskey, Edward tops him with more. Louise eyes Edward angrily. I smile in the quiet that follows. Bubbles of tension simmer, then calm.

‘There is so much for us to celebrate you for, Mum. We each have our individual stories, personal ones that we’ll never forget, but collectively we thank you and celebrate you for the love and care you’ve given us all throughout our lives. During all our ups and downs and in-between moments, your love for us has never wavered, has never lessened. We have always felt you’ve given us your all, dedicated yourself completely and utterly to this family, and we have selfishly but gladly taken it all from you. Thank you.’

There are murmurs and nods of heads in agreement. My eyes fill.

‘We all love you very, very much, Mum.’ George’s voice cracks, and his wife Judith reaches out to hold his hand. He composes himself, my eldest boy who never cried in front of anybody, not even when he fell and hurt himself, wasn’t picked for the football team or fell in and out of love in the past. Only with me he’d shed those tears. He cried with me last week, let all those tears fall down those once-again pudgy cheeks, and I, with older hands, wiped them away for him again.

‘So let us all raise our glasses in a toast. To Mum, we all love you and … we will miss you beyond words.’

‘To Mum,’ voices repeat and eyes moisten.

There is a silence now. A sad one. They will be fine, they will all, always be fine.

I am beside Fred, but he looks before him to where I lie. He squeezes my hand, kisses me gently on the forehead and finally, slowly, lets go.

I drift away but don’t go far. Will never, ever be far.

8 Mallard and May

‘Ah, this is the life, isn’t it, May?’ Mallard sighs with satisfaction as he makes himself comfortable along the lakeshore.

The crystal-blue water shimmers beneath the light of the sunrise, its ripples appearing like goose pimples as morning warmth touches cold. The water moves up and down as though, like Mallard, it takes a giant sigh of relaxation, breathing in and then releasing. The sun slowly rises, by far the largest buoy in the large lake. The more it peeps above the horizon, the further the orange glow seeps from the sun and spills its way, like ink, towards Mallard on the shore. His personal pathway to the sun. He knows things can’t possibly get any better than this. Him and May, back in Ireland at last, after a winter spent at their holiday home in South Africa.

‘It’s lovely, love.’ May fidgets beside him, restless as always as she picks at some bread.

‘You’re not too cold? We could go somewhere else if you’re cold?’

‘No I’m nice and warm, pet.’

‘Are you tired after the flight? You look a bit tired. Maybe we should have gone straight home instead of stopping off here.’

‘I am a bit tired, Mallard. It felt longer than usual. Or maybe I’m just getting old.’

‘Well it can’t be that,’ Mallard smiles. ‘It must have been longer than usual. Why don’t you go for a dip?’

‘That’s a good idea.’ She brightens up and hops over the harsh pebbles that border the lake.

Mallard looks out to the lake and spots familiar characters bobbing nearby in the waters. He quickly follows after her. ‘Actually, I’ll join you, May, those French lads over there were on the flight with us. Never stopped jabbering on for a second, do you remember them?’

‘Oh, you know me, love, I was in my own world. I was just watching the view for the entire journey.’

‘Well that’s what I wanted to do too but it was just bonjour this, oui, oui that, all the way over. And I wouldn’t trust them: males such as those just come over here to ruffle a few feathers, if you know what I mean.’

‘Oh, Mallard,’ May laughs. ‘You exaggerate too much. They look like they’re a friendly bunch to me.’

‘Of course they do, that’s what they want you to think. For Christ’s sake, don’t look now, May, they’re looking right over at us! Ah, hello there!’ He calls across to them and adds under his breath, ‘They’re coming over.’

’ Bonjour.’

‘Eh, yeah, bonjour to you, too. Enjoy your flight?’

‘Oui, oui, it was très pleasant. Scenery was spectacular all of the way. Let us introduce ourselves, je m’appelle Pierre and this is monfrère— my brother—Jean-Paul.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ May says politely.

‘This is my wife May, and I’m Mallard.’

‘Ah! Mallard!’ He laughs.

‘Yes, my parents were imaginative,’ he says, feeling himself heat up.

‘What a charming name.’ Pierre smiles. ‘Enchanté.’

Jean-Paul doesn’t say anything. Mallard eyes him suspiciously.

The four of them bob up and down rhythmically in the water. The motion is soothing and the gentle breeze of the morning sun tickles and brightens their faces, like a paintbrush on canvas.

May disappears as she dives head down into the waters, and not being the best conversationalist in the world, particularly with strangers, Mallard looks around awkwardly.

‘So, Mallard, are you from around here?’

‘No, no, we live more inland, Carrick-on-Shannon to be precise, but thought we’d give this Lake Corrib a crack, seein’ as it was such a lovely day and all and we’ve heard so much about it. We always travel with a large group, from in and around the same area, but we just thought we’d go out on our own for a little while. We’ll head home shortly.’

May, who’s still head down, kicks the surface of the water and manages to splash the three of them.

‘Eh, sorry about that. May’s a keen diver.’ He watches the soles of her feet splish, splash. ‘We’ve got a place in South Africa where we spend the winter, but it’s always nice to get back home, isn’t it?’

‘Bien sur. J’adore Irlande. We come every year.’

‘Is that so? Seems these days it’s the other way around, with the country doing so well and all, the skies are filled with plane loads of people flying out to their holiday homes. Can’t get away from the Irish at all, I find,’ Mallard says seriously.

To his confusion, they both laugh and Mallard can’t relax until May pops back up from the water.

‘Where do you stay when you’re here, Pierre?’ she asks, shaking off the water from her face, sending droplets flying into Mallard’s eyes.

‘Every year we have spent months in Dublin city. J’adore Dublin. We spent most of our days in St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. The weather was splendid, such a lovely park with lake and waterfall. We have been every year, but for last year.’

Jean-Paul shoots him a warning look.

‘Where did you go last year?’ Mallard asked curiously, unsure of Pierre’s brother.

‘We stayed in Kildare last year but never again, now it harbours such sad memories for us,’ Pierre’s tone changes.

Jean-Paul, who has been silent for practically the entire conversation, looks away from his brother and floats ever so slightly away from them, detaching himself from the conversation.

Mallard, not good with emotions, looks to May for help. He cocks his head sideways, motioning for her to say something to the upset Pierre.

‘Oh, Pierre,’ May says softly, ‘I do hope everything is OK.’

’ Non, mon frère—pardonez-moi, my brother—we lost him on our last trip to Ireland.’

‘Oh, dear!’ May says. ‘How did you lose him?’

‘He was shot.’

‘Shot?!’ she gasps. ‘Sweet Lord, where on earth, how on earth, who on earth would shoot him here?’

‘We were exploring the area, we had never been to Kildare before. July last year. Très green, lots of golf courses, very pretty. But we see men, with guns and they bang! bang!, and Luc, he fall down.’

May gasps and moves closer to Mallard for protection.

‘But surely the men were caught? And punished? I hope they were locked away for life,’ Mallard says, feeling angry.

’ Non. I’m sure these men were not, for there was nothing we could do. We had to leave him, to save ourselves. That I will never forgive myself for, but if we were to stay in the area we would be like sitting ducks. We do not know who the thugs are, where they are and how we can prove anything to anyone.’

Jean-Paul looks to him with concern and Pierre responds, ‘ Je vais bien, Jean-Paul. Merci.’

Mallard is suspicious.

‘Oh, that’s awful,’ May sobs.

‘Now now, love.’

‘What is the world coming to, at all?’

‘Oui, the violence. So unfair, so unjust.’

‘I’m surprised you’d want to return here at all,’ Mallard says.

‘We flew to the North of England but it was très froid. Perhaps we will one day return to our home country France, but we prefer it here and Luc would have wanted us to return to this place that we journeyed to together. We travelled here from South Africa with many friends, as I’m sure you saw on our flight, and we will stay with them. Écoutez moi, safety in numbers, Mallard and May, remember that.’

‘Yes,’ Mallard says, huddling closer to his wife. ‘Indeed.’

‘Maybe we should go back home now, Mallard,’ May suggests in a quiet voice. ‘Back to our friends and family.’

‘Yes my love. Perhaps we should.’

They say their goodbyes and Mallard and May watch Pierre and Jean-Paul exit the lake and make their way back to their group.

‘Oh how sad, Mallard. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever lost you.’

‘And I too, my love, I too.’

‘You know I’ve wanted to thank you for not leaving me after we had the little ones—’

‘Now, now, May,’ he interrupts. ‘There’s no need to get into all of that. It’s in the past now.’

‘No, Mallard.’ She turns to face him. ‘I want to talk about it, you never let me talk about it. Most of my friends, and Susie just recently … as soon as they had the little ones, their other halves were off. I’ve heard of it all too often. I don’t know why they felt they all had to form that little male group together,’ she says angrily. Then she softens. ‘But you didn’t. You stayed with me and I appreciate that.’

Mallard takes in her little face, browned and soft. He smiles. ‘I couldn’t have left you, my love, not for a second.’

‘But I am so plain and you aren’t. You are—’

‘Hush, May, why are you speaking like this? I love you. We beat all the odds, didn’t we? All these years together?’

She nods, happily.

‘Now, let’s get back to the rest of them, shall we?’

They bob up and down in the water for a little while longer, watching the sun rising in the sky, feeling content and safe with one another and savouring the moment. Mallard nuzzles May and they smile at one another.

Shortly after the sun has pulled itself out of the water, they leave the waters, dry off and begin their journey home. After many pleasant hours spent journeying through the countryside, they reach the outskirts of their home town.

‘It’s very quiet around here, isn’t it?’ May comments to Mallard, as they make their way through the village and to the peace and quiet of their home beyond it.

‘Indeed it is, I wonder if there’s something going on. A gathering somewhere of some kind?’

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The loudest noise in the distance, so sudden, May lets out a scream.

‘My goodness, Mallard! What on earth!’

‘Stay close, my love, stay close.’ Mallard’s heart slams in his chest while May whimpers beside him.

‘Is it the people Pierre was talking about?’ Her voice trembles.

‘It can’t be my love.’ But Mallard doesn’t sound so sure. ‘We must make our way as quietly as possible. Find somewhere safe to hide until they have gone. Honestly, a few months out of this country and look what happens. It feels like a war zone. What on earth has happened? Hush now, we must be quiet.’

They quietly make their way through the trees, only minutes from their home, trying to make as little rustling sound as possible. They hear the men close by and suddenly Mallard feels far too old for this situation. If he was younger he could be faster, but he and May must be still now and very, very quiet. May steps on a branch and it snaps loudly.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

He jumps. There is silence, he glimpses through the leaves, the men are nowhere in sight. He remains quiet a little longer and holds his breath, unsure whether they’re being tricked. When a few minutes pass, he sighs with relief.

‘I think we’re OK now, love. I think they’re gone.’

May is silent.

Mallard’s heart thuds again.

‘May?’ He spins around.

May is lying by his side, her eyes open staring lifelessly at the skies above.

‘May,’ he begins to whimper. ‘Oh, my May. My sweet May. Wake up, love. Wake up.’

But he knows May won’t wake, for the life in her has gone. He hears footsteps coming towards him. A hand reaches through the leaves and branches and comes down beside him. He moves away quickly. The hand grabs May, carries her upwards into the air.

‘There it is,’ the man says. ‘That’ll do nicely for tomorrow’s dinner.’

‘Wife will be impressed by a bit of duck à l’orange,’ the other jokes, and they make their way back out of the trees.

Mallard, broken and lost, watches from his hiding place among the reeds, as they carry his May by her legs, hanging her upside down. They make their way through the marsh, their long hunting guns resting over their shoulders.

Now there is nothing but quiet for Mallard. He sits for hours on the muddy floor, listening to the sounds of shots far off in the distance, and strains his ears to hear the sound of May’s call. But it doesn’t come. Anger sets in as he wonders what on earth the world has become; such sadness overcomes him as he contemplates what his world holds for him without his May.

Hunger and friends find him alone and trembling hours later and so, building up all the courage he possibly can, he finally leaves the safety of his hiding place and flies off towards the same sun he watched rise that morning, with May.

With each flap of his wings and with each memory of May, his heavy wings lighten as he allows his love for her to lift him. He floats higher and higher, and follows his personal pathway to the sun.

9 The Things That I Remember

My granddad used to steal the broccoli from my dinner plate when my mother wasn’t looking. I’d sit alone at the kitchen table that had become my prison, with legs dangling, podgy fist under double chin, staring at a plate of, by then, cold vegetables. Everyone else had long since finished their dessert and moved on to the TV room, where I could hear them laughing with bellies full of veg they never seemed to have a problem swallowing.

I was, as usual, under strict orders not to leave the table until the plate was emptied. No amount of tears, crocodile or otherwise, and no amount of retching, dry or otherwise, could save me. Plans for a trip to the toilet armed with a mouthful of food and a readiness to spit had been foiled. It seemed nothing now could get me away from the boredom and loneliness of dinnertime alone.

Then, just as I would feel that all hope was lost, my granddad would save me; white hair and moustache to the rescue. His hand would jump onto my plate, grab the broccoli, and into his round, Santa-Claus-like tummy it would go. I would smile at him with relief, he would wink and then I would sigh and return my gaze to my plate. Only a few more to go. I loved when he visited, especially at dinnertimes. I remember the feel of his cardigan as it itched my cheek. I see my small chubby fingers playing with big, brown, shiny buttons. I remember a feather in his hat. I hear him talk about his calculator—my granddad, who thought his pocket calculator was the greatest invention in the whole world.

My grandma used to take her teeth out of her mouth, hold them in her hand and scare my friends away. She would wrap her lips into her mouth, opening and shutting her gob like a fish, gummy as the day she was born. While others would scream and run, I would throw my head back and laugh. I remember how she used to dive onto my bed to wake me up in the mornings.

The cross on the end of her necklace always fell down between her bosoms, and I would watch the emerald stone, resting there alongside the lines and crackles of her skin. She would sing when people were silent, hum while they were hushed. She would devour food with such pleasure you would think it was the first time she had experienced taste.

My uncles used to throw me from person to person like a ball, in the front garden. Swirling visions of greens, blues and bearded men mixed with the sounds of my own laughter trapped at the back of my throat, their laughter and my mother’s shouts for them to stop. But I’d keep on swirling, rolling through the air like a snowball in a fight but always landing in safe arms.

My father used to slide the loose change from the windowsill into his hand every morning and then put it in his pocket before he went to work. The windows used to steam up in the kitchen on cold dark winter nights when my mother cooked dinner. My sister had a T-shirt that said ‘Kisses for Sale’. I remember liking the sound of tap shoes on the marble fireplace, I remember nobody else agreeing.

These are the people I love. These are the people I spend this year’s Valentine’s Day with. I’m home alone, living happily in my head, remembering, laughing, crying and missing them. I want to pluck them from my memories and pull them into my day, into my present life. I want them as they were, to talk to me as I am now.

This Valentine’s Day I am home alone, but I’m far from feeling it. I’m flicking through a photo album looking through snapshots of moments, single pieces of a jigsaw from an overall picture I never fully understood. I sense I’m surrounded by all those who take this time to embrace me. Their memories are their hugs, the tears of happiness that run down my cheeks, their kisses. Outside my window, the world is busy getting ready to go out, getting ready to live for a moment that will be remembered another day. And I feel OK about that.

It’s OK that I’m not out tonight with a partner, playing footsie under the table, meaningful glances over a flickering candle, holding hands above the table while we spoon dessert into one another’s mouth. It’s OK that I received no cards today and it’s OK that every film on television is about a kind of love that I don’t have tonight. It’s OK.

I’ve just had a long bath, I’ve finished my new favourite book, I’m wrapped in a towelling robe and curled up on the sofa with a mug of steaming coffee in one hand. I’m looking out at the dark night through the window, at the rain splashing against the glass, blurring the grey landscape, and I watch the drops chasing one another down the pane. It’s OK that I’m not running through the rain, holding hands with a lover, avoiding puddles and laughing. It’s OK that I received no flowers today, that I’m not all dressed up with somewhere to go.

We don’t always have to do something, we don’t always have to create memories; sometimes it’s just enough to simply remember. Today, these are the things that I remember.

Content

Ahern Cecelia Short Stories: The Every Year Collection

1 Every Year

2 Twenty-four Minutes

3 Next Stop: Table for Two

4 The Calling

5 The End

6 The Production Line

7 Celebrating Mum

8 Mallard and May

9 The Things That I Remember