Page 43 of The F*cking Fabulous Forties Club

‘Here you are helping us, and I didn’t… I wasn’t… when your dad…’

Oh. That’s why she’s apologising.

Daniel and Lazlo are harmonising beautifully now and Conal and I are trying to quiet them. I turn back to tell Laura this isn’t about me. It’s about helping her, but she is bolting from the room and even though Daniel is doing his best to drown out every other sound in the entire universe, I hear Laura sobbing loudly as she runs from the room.

‘I’ll go after her,’ I tell Conal, as he manages to soothe both dogs into submission with a sneaky custard cream.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ I say, because I have realised that Nelly, the elephant in the room, is done with us ignoring her.

29

WITH A TRUMP, TRUMP, TRUMP

The bathroom door is locked and I can hear Laura sobbing inside.

‘Laura,’ I say while knocking gently on the door. ‘Will you come out so we can talk?’

‘In… a… minute…’ she stutters between gasping sobs.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘But just so you know, I’m not going anywhere. And I wasn’t trying to upset you. I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad.’ I hope she knows that there is no way, no matter what has happened between us, that I would be so cruel as to use her grief to make her feel guilty for not being there for me when my father died. I’m not that callous or cruel.

‘I… know…’ she says, her voice just a little calmer now. ‘I know.’

I hear the loo flush followed by the sound of running water and then Laura opens the door, her eyes puffy and red-rimmed, her cheeks blotchy. She is twisting her hands together in the way she always did when she was nervous.

‘We should talk about what happened,’ she says. ‘Shouldn’t we?’

I nod, because as much as I don’t really want to dig into that particular chapter of our lives we can’t keep on with it hanging over our heads. I realise that Laura has been scared of that particular axe falling all this week, and on top of her raw grief, it must’ve felt like an unbearable burden. Maybe it was wrong of me to tell her we didn’t need to talk about it when we first spoke. I’d thought it was the right thing to do to tell her it could wait. Looking at her now, however, I see it has been eating at her and it would be better if we pulled that old and horrible sticking plaster off once and for all.

‘Let’s sit down,’ she says, leading the way into her old bedroom – which looks almost the same as I remember it. Of course, the posters are gone from the walls and the dressing table is no longer cluttered with Body Shop smells or stained with Heather Shimmer lipstick and the remnants of whatever dye Laura had put in her hair.

As I sit beside her on the bed, I wonder what it would be like if walls could talk. The things that this room saw and heard during those formative years would probably make us both cringe to the soles of our feet, but for the most part the hours we spent here were happy ones. They were of a time when we thought nothing would ever break our bond of friendship. We were so sure we’d be in each other’s lives forever. Even more so when Laura’s then boyfriend, Aidan, introduced me to his best friend Simon Cooke. The delirium we’d felt at being able to double date was next level. We had dreams and plans of holidaying together with our eventual families and growing up and growing old as besties.

And for the longest time, we stayed on that path.

‘First of all,’ she says, eyes cast downward, ‘I need to tell you that I went to your dad’s funeral. I’m sorry I didn’t have the balls to come to the house for the wake, or to come up and give you a hug at the church. I was scared of making a scene or making the whole thing harder for you than it needed to be.’

My breath catches in my throat, the familiar pull of grief winding its way around my heart. ‘You came?’ I ask, my turn now to sound croaky and emotional. I’d be lying if I said I never wondered if Laura would show up at the funeral. It wasn’t at the forefront of my mind, but it was there and I remember wishing she would. Even though it had been eight years since we’d last spoken. Even though I had Niamh to support me, and my boys to take care of. Even though my focus was on my own pain and on my mother’s pain – I felt as if the final part of the puzzle was missing. I knew that with both Laura and Niamh by my side, it would be marginally more bearable.

‘I couldn’t not,’ she says, blinking full tears, which fall freely down her cheeks. ‘He was a great man,’ she says. I nod in response because I don’t trust myself to try and speak. I know if I do, I will merely disintegrate into a sobbing mess and the purpose of this visit is to help Laura with her grief, not come at my own full force. ‘He was like a father figure to me, when I didn’t have one of my own. You know that – how he watched out for us when we were teenagers and eejits without an ounce of sense in our heads. It was your daddy who would pick us up from town, or wait outside while we went to a disco or a concert or whatever we were at. I couldn’t not go to pay my respects. But I sat at the back of the church and even though every part of me ached to run over to you and give you a hug when I saw you walking in behind his coffin, it wasn’t about me. It would have drawn attention away from your daddy, and God knows he deserved all the attention and more.’

I’m drowning under the weight of conflicting feelings. I’m so touched, but there’s also an old familiar feeling pushing its way into the light. It’s the wee demon on my shoulder who has held on to all the hurt and pain that I’m supposed to have let go of in a bid to move on and who wants to scream that life can be brutally unfair.

So yes, Laura came to my dad’s funeral but she didn’t hug me. She didn’t let me know. She wasn’t there to support me. She was there to assuage her own guilt. She was putting her own comfort first. Just like she did when Simon started playing away from home. She should’ve had my back. I trusted her to have my back. I needed her.

I can see Laura is crying, of course I can. And I know she is waiting for me to say something. She’s probably waiting for me to do a ‘Becca’ and say it’s all in the past and it doesn’t matter. All that matters now is how we move on.

That’s what I want to say. That’s what I want to feel. But in this moment, I don’t feel it. The person I feel sorry for in this moment is that teenage me who would sit with her best friends in this very room listening to music, experimenting with make-up and being utterly convinced that these girls were the best friends that anyone could ever wish for.

That girl who ended up, at the age of thirty-six, alone with two semi-feral nine-year-old boys trying to help them understand why their daddy had walked out. Trying to understand, herself, why he had. No, it hadn’t been perfect. But it hadn’t been awful either. At least I didn’t think so. We were just busy parents raising demanding boys and working hard jobs.

Of course we didn’t have the same time for each other that we once had. Of course we didn’t get to go on romantic holidays, just the two of us, any more. Of course our weekends were spent running from swimming lessons, to football practice, to playdates instead of lounging in the house together reading the papers and drinking wine. Life wasn’t as enjoyable as I thought it would be, but I didn’t give up. Simon did.

And when he did, that woman who was once a hopeful teenage girl, and who is now the very cynical woman I’ve become, lost her best friend.

She had stood with Simon. ‘He’s Aidan’s best friend,’ she’d said, when she’d allowed Simon to move into their spare room. ‘What am I supposed to do? I don’t want to fuck up my own marriage by kicking him out,’ she’d said, as she made a bed for him, cooked for him, drank wine with him in the evenings and washed his dirty socks and pants. ‘I know he’s hurt you. I know he’s been a bastard but he has nowhere to go and Aidan wants to help his friend,’ she’d say and I’d wanted to ask her why she didn’t want to help her best friend with the same vigour.

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