Again, Rachel, page 3
‘What’s up, pet?’
‘Luke.’
‘What about him? No, don’t tell me, come straight over. Drive safely!’
Half an hour later, I was pulling up outside Nola’s beautiful red-brick house.
Unbelievably, it was twenty years since I had been a patient at the Cloisters and she’d come in to tell her story of recovery from addiction. With her beautiful highlights, zippy little sports car and impressive job, I thought she must be an actress in the pay of the treatment centre.
However, when I left rehab, I discovered she really was an addict. But she was drug-free, happy, hilarious and robust enough to weather all emotional storms. I wanted to be exactly like her so she took me under her wing and helped me to grow up.
My time in the Cloisters had revealed that I was an addict, but Nola had convinced me that, without taking anything mood-altering, I could live a normal life, a better-than-normal life. That I could cope with unpleasant emotions, that I could aspire to a healthy relationship with a man, that I could aim for whatever job I wanted – a life I was sure could never happen to a person as worthless as me.
I parked my car, hurried up Nola’s black-and-white chessboard path and Harry, her delicious husband, opened their smartly painted front door and welcomed me inside.
In my early days in recovery I’d a right crush on Harry, he was just lovely – always keeping a respectful distance but never less than kind. I yearned for a man as good as him.
Nola used to tell me that if I stayed clean long enough, I too would get a life ‘beyond my wildest dreams’. That was hard to believe.
Yet it had happened. All of it. Including a man as lovely as Harry.
Nola put a mug of tea in front of me. ‘Go on, tell me.’
It didn’t take long. ‘So?’ I asked. ‘Should I go to the funeral?’
‘Was Joey ringing off his own bat? Or on Luke’s say-so?’
‘I didn’t think to ask, and I’m not ringing him back – I have some pride.’
‘Grand.’ She laughed. ‘No one’s making you. Okay, let’s look at the facts. On the one hand you and Luke have unfinished business –’
‘Do we, though, Nola? It was so long ago. Isn’t it – what’s the word when accounts have been inactive so long that they no longer exist? – moribund? Inert?’
‘This might be the chance for you to tidy up some of that mess.’
‘But what if I see him and end up devastated all over again?’
‘What’s your inner voice telling you?’
‘Nothing. Radio silence.’
Nola lapsed into thought. ‘In which case, you must Golden Key it.’
‘No!’ This was a device Nola was far too fond of: when a problem has myriad possible solutions but no clear answer, you put the whole snarly mess into an imaginary box and lock it with a Golden Key – also imaginary. Then, you do nothing. You don’t even think about it: as soon as it pops up in your mind, you put it back in the box and wait until the universe unfolds the answer.
You don’t drive your friends and sisters insane by discussing it until everyone is crying from tedium. No. You just keep your mouth shut and wait it out.
(The reasoning is that humans are weaklings who want the solution which gives the quickest gratification; we deliberately blind ourselves to any medium-term damage. I knew all of this; I just didn’t want to hear it.)
‘Ah, Nola! Can’t you just tell me what to do.’
‘It doesn’t work like that and you know it.’
‘Sorry. You’re right. Absolutely. Yes. Thank you. Golden Keying it right now.’
Feck that. I was getting a second opinion. But I had to choose my person carefully, so they’d tell me what I wanted to hear. Even if I wasn’t sure what that was.
My sister Margaret was very cut and dried, imbued with a bone-deep sense of right and wrong. I could hear her insisting, ‘You have to go to that funeral! She was once your mother-in-law – have some decency.’
Mum would agree, but only because she adored funerals, beadily checking out the quality of the coffin, the mawkishness of the hymns and the enthusiasm of the crying. Though she enjoyed robust good health, she was constantly planning her own send-off – ‘The saddest hymns you can find’ – and was adamant about one thing: ‘There’s to be none of this “life being celebrated” codswallop! I want people in floods.’ An expensive, hardwood coffin had been earmarked. (‘Do not get me a flimsy wicker thing. I heard of a man who slid out, slid right out and fell onto the church floor as he was being carried up the aisle. And he had no trousers on, nor underpants either, only his shirt and jacket. Do not let that happen to me.’)
Helen would tell me there was no need to go. ‘Fuck him!’ she’d say, her voice dripping scorn. ‘You owe Luke Costello nothing!’
Anna? She had a strong fondness for woo-woo codology. She’d probably agree with Nola.
Claire? Hard to know which side she’d come down on.
Dad? If he dared to express an opinion at all, no one ever paid any attention.
My best friend, Brigit? She’d be so here for this but she was busy. A mother of three boys, aged fifteen, fourteen and ten, and a girl of eight, she lived in the gorgeous wilds of north Connemara, at everyone’s beck and call. Working from home (but oh my God, what a home), her job description was ‘part-time’ but the hours looked suspiciously closer to full-time.
A breezy text would be the way to go with Brigit. That way, if she liked the sound of things, she could get involved and if she had too much on, she could pass.
I hugged Nola and hurried back to my car, having decided to consult all of my sisters. At least that way I’d get to explore every possible option.
I reached for my phone then – spookily – at that very moment a WhatsApp arrived from Claire. Need to talk. Dilemma.
I replied, I’ve a dilemma too. Calling a summit for 8pm tonight. You round?
Yep, she said. My dilemma a private one, tho. Need a pre-summit with you.
Our family summits usually took place in Mum and Dad’s house because they lived equidistant from my sisters and me. But Claire and I arranged our sneaky pre-summit for seven forty-five.
Then I WhatsApped the Walsh family group: Mum and Dad’s, tonight, 8pm. I need advice, Luke’s mum has died, should I go to the funeral?
Immediately my phone blew up with messages, texts, voice-notes – like the internet when Beyoncé drops a surprise album. All of my sisters were on for meeting up, except for Anna, who rang to rage about the inconvenience of her living in New York. (And who advised me to ‘Put it out to the universe.’)
My next act was to call Mum, to check she’d be home. Even if she wasn’t, we’d still meet there, eat her biscuits and frighten Dad. She greeted me with, ‘Rachel? Good of you to ring. I could have been lying in a crumpled heap on the hall floor, dead for four days, without a person to notice I was missing.’
I called Mum daily and so did Margaret; Mum lived with another adult – Dad; she played bridge approximately twelve times a week; four hours each day were spent on the phone to her pals, complaining about things – she was healthier and more sociable than me.
‘Are you in this evening?’ I asked.
‘Why?’ She was instantly suspicious. ‘What do you want? But hear me now! I’m not minding your dog, I’m not hemming your skirt and you can’t borrow my car. I’ve a life too, you know.’
‘Advice is what I’m looking for.’
‘Buy the thing.’
‘What thing? No, Mum, that’s not –’
‘Just buy the thing, whatever it is. Life is short. That’s my advice.’
‘I’ll be there about eight.’
‘We’ve already had our dinner. Gluten-free sausages.’
‘Since when are you gluten-intolerant?’
‘Hah! We’re not! We’re just being adventurous. I’ll tell you something, you wouldn’t know the difference. Next week, we might try vegan cheddar.’
I whizzed home to feed an ecstatic Crunchie – she always behaved as if I’d been gone and given up for dead for about three hundred years – then left again to meet Claire. Foolishly I arrived on time and parked five houses down from Mum and Dad’s. Seven minutes later, Claire’s car bounded over the speed bumps. Even before she came to an abrupt, ear-piercing halt, her electric window was whining open and her stylish, oyster-grey nails were beckoning me over.
She refused to ever get into my car. The heating didn’t work and it made her depressed.
The night was misty. Scuttling along, hugging the wall, hoping to avoid any neighbours, I slid into her warm, fragrant, leather-lined Audi. ‘Lovely smell,’ I said.
‘Diptyque,’ she said. ‘Tuberose. They do air fresheners for cars now.’
That was Claire all over. Right at the front of the fashion vanguard. Ever-questing, snuffling out new brands – skincare, handbags, lifestyle. Devoted to Porter magazine! Never afraid to spend money!
She gave me a quick hug. ‘Am I late? God, I am. So, are you okay?’
Her hair, in a fashionable shade of mouse brown, was in a fabulous, falling-down French twist, her skin glowed and although I didn’t know what age she was currently claiming to be, she looked good for it.
‘Your face.’ I took a second look. ‘Where’d your pores go? It’s amazing.’
‘Had a thing done.’
She was always having things done. Her favourite phrase was, ‘I’m not going down without a fight.’ (That, or ‘Make it a strong one.’)
She deserved to look as great as she did. She had a personal trainer and – crucially – showed up for her sessions, instead of texting ten minutes before the start, pretending she had a sore throat (which was what I’d kept doing the few times I’d signed up). The only carb to cross her lips was vodka and she was very susceptible to Goop, obediently buying their powdered unicorn hoof or whatever their latest thing was. Her one blind spot was a fondness for fake tan but, on that matter, she couldn’t be reasoned with. Everyone has their weakness.
She was so invested in her youthful look that she didn’t like spending time in public with Margaret, who was younger than her, because Margaret had ‘aged gracefully’ (according to Margaret). Or ‘gone to hell, entirely’ (according to Claire).
Their battleground was Margaret’s hair. Margaret had stopped colouring it a few years ago, but as far as I was concerned she was the real winner because it was now this amazing cool silver colour. I reckon she actually looked better than she had in her twenties.
Sometimes I thought about doing the same thing myself – the freedom was alluring. Think of all that time and money I’d save. Even more importantly, consider all the emotional energy saved – the last ten days before my roots got done were hard going.
‘Did it hurt?’ I asked Claire. ‘The thing you had done?’
‘Oh Christ, yeah! Even after six co-codamol.’
‘Six? Claire!’
And there you had at least two of the differences between Claire and me: I too would like the poreless skin, but I wasn’t prepared to suffer for it. Instead, I spent a fortune on serums, doing constant ongoing research. It was one of my many micro-obsessions.
The tragedy in all of this was that our second youngest sister Anna, had The Best Job in The World, an executive at McArthur on the Park, a PR company which repped some of the most exciting skincare on the planet.
In practical terms, it meant that we had glorious, giddy-making access to free products. And even so, I still couldn’t stop buying things. Free stuff is always lovely. But nothing is as alluring as New and Exciting. Or More.
The second difference was that Claire mood-altered with happy abandon and never developed a dependency: she was an enthusiastic drinker and had a whole suite of pills at her fingertips.
Me, though? I’d been to rehab twenty years ago for being too fond of cocaine and other drugs. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me and these days I lived a normal, happy life – so long as I steered clear of any ‘mood-alterers’. Which meant no codeine, no occasional Xanax for anxiety, nothing at all – not even alcohol.
Which baffled my ‘loved ones’ (my sisters and parents). Alcohol hadn’t been a big problem for me back in the day, it had been all the other stuff. But I was a person who could get addicted to rice cakes. To tap water. To tofu, magnolia paint, nude lip gloss, boiled cauliflower – anything. No matter how bland, how unremarkable, I could get addicted to it. So, no alcohol for Rachel.
‘How’re you bearing up?’ Claire asked.
‘We’ll save it until we’re inside. Tell me what’s going on with you.’
She pressed her lips together. ‘You know Adam?’
The man she’d been with for twenty-three years? ‘Er …’
‘And you know our friends, Piet and Beatriz?’
‘Mmmm.’ They were fairly new but Claire and Adam seemed to see a lot of them. They were a bit flashy. Very Claire. No offence meant.
‘So, turns out that they’re swingers.’
Oh, here we go. The real surprise was that Claire hadn’t taken up swinging much sooner.
Valiantly, I said, ‘No judgement.’ My personal brand was ‘In Recovery but Still Great Fun’; it was important to seem breezy about all lifestyle choices in case I stopped being invited to things. People were already uncomfortable around me when they wanted to get hammered and I was sitting there, nursing a Diet Coke. I worked hard to never seem disapproving.
But the truth was that I had a good deal of judgement here. Based entirely on the fact that I wouldn’t like to swing with Piet – he was too big, he shaved his head and he wore chunky gold rings.
‘They want to, you know, swing with us. Beatriz fancies Adam and Piet fancies me.’
Well, they were all adults.
‘Piet wants to date me. And Beatriz would, yeah, date Adam.’
Dating? I’d visualized swinging as a more generalized sort of thing, that they’d all be flubbing round together, like kids in a ball pit. But dating? That sounded a lot more … intimate.
Unless ‘dating’ just meant ‘riding’?
‘Piet suggested it to Adam. Adam told him to sling it. But I’d, you know … I think I want to.’
‘You can’t make Adam swing if he doesn’t want to.’
‘… yeeeahh. Maybe I should just have a thing with Piet? He’s always giving me hot stares and saying things like “If I didn’t know that Adam would throttle me …” It’s sexy.’
‘Having a thing with Piet is different from swinging.’ Then, ‘Claire, are you sure you want to be a swinger? It sounds to me that you just fancy Piet.’
She exhaled. ‘I really fancy Piet. On the mercifully rare occasions I have to have sex with Adam, I pretend it’s Piet.’
Horses for courses. In my opinion, Adam was a showstopper. Big and tall but not in that meaty, Piet way. And he suited Claire. They were both immensely social, great fun and said yes to everything – at least everything that involved alcohol and other people. It would be hard to find a more perfect couple.
‘It would upset Adam if I had an affair on the sly –’
‘– ya think?’
‘– but if we were swingers, it would all be out in the open.’
‘Listen to me, Claire. Swinging is grand if everyone is on the same page. You and Adam need to talk about this. And remember, you and Adam have a good thing going. It’s rare and wonderful. Seriously, you don’t know how lucky you are.’
‘Ah, stop! No need to be all serious. Just tell me what to do. You’re wise.’ Jokily, she elbowed me. ‘Yes or no? G’wan, say yes!’
‘Okay.’ I sighed. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what to do.’
Her face lit up. Eagerly she said, ‘Yes?’
‘Golden Key it.’
‘NOOOOOOOO!’ Then, ‘Christ, here’s Margaret, in her anorak of doom. Say nothing.’
Claire and I clambered from the car, while Margaret gave us a wounded look from inside her navy nylon hood. ‘You’d think that, by now, I’d have got used to being left out of things,’ she said as the three of us hurried through the strangely wet mist to Mum’s front door, Claire holding her Bottega pouch over her wonderful hair. ‘But it still hurts.’
Luckily that was the moment when Claire’s high leather boots skidded on the damp pavement, sending her flying into Mrs Kilfeather’s hedge. By the time the diversion was over, Mum was hooshing us into the hall.
‘In, in, get in,’ she said, rotating her arm. ‘Before we’re all drowned.’
‘The soles of new boots should be sandpapered,’ Margaret said. ‘If you don’t want to slip.’
‘You’re right. They should. I’d do it, only they’re Louboutins.’ That was Claire’s version of an apology.
‘Take off those coats and shoes,’ Mum said. ‘Don’t be bringing the rain into my Good Front Room.’
Margaret obediently slung her anorak on the knob at the bottom of the stairs, I threw my coat over it but Claire refused to remove hers. ‘It’s not a coat, it’s a shirt-dress.’
Again, that was totally Claire. You’d see a photoshoot in a magazine, say of a woman wearing a floor-length, organza shirt-dress, over flared trousers and a clingy fine-knit jumper, and you’d think, That’s beautiful, but no normal person would ever wear it. Claire would, though.
‘Shirt-dress, coat-dress, call it whatever you like,’ Mum said. ‘It’s still wet. Take it off.’
‘For the love of God!’ Claire said, but she complied.
The three of us stuck our heads into the television room to say hello to Dad. Anxiously he looked up, like a badger peering out from a burrow. ‘What’s going on?’ He clutched his beloved remote control against his chest.
‘Summit meeting.’
‘Feck.’ Longingly, he eyed the telly. Golf, from what I could see. ‘Am I needed?’
It would be cruel to interrupt his viewing. ‘Just tell me. Should I go to Luke’s mother’s funeral?’
‘She’s dead? That’s a terrible pity, she was a lovely woman. Who told you about it?’
‘Joey. He rang me. Out of the blue.’
