Page 13 of The F*cking Fabulous Forties Club

I lost hours of my youth daydreaming that Clark Kent and Fox Mulder would battle it out for my affection. I make a mental note to look up how they have both aged as if that will be the deciding factor now as to which one wins my heart. I don’t allow myself to think about how much I’ve aged.

There’s a copy of More magazine, which we roar with laughter flicking through, especially when we reach the page outlining the Position of the Fortnight. It was as close to hard core pornography as our teenage selves got. Niamh and I would hide the magazine from our mothers lest we be scolded for reading such filth. Laura didn’t have to hide the magazine from her mum, because Kitty was cool like that, but she would hide it anyway having determined she would rather die than discuss ‘The Wheelbarrow’ with her mother.

Not one of us had so much as seen a penis in real life and yet each fortnight we read that article as if we were nymphomaniacs with PhDs in the Kama Sutra.

There’s an empty bottle of West Coast Cooler in the box, which makes all three of us have the fiercest craving for the super sweet wine spritzer, but not strongly enough for us to actually do anything about it. There are a couple of tickets for Squires nightclub, which obviously had been placed in the box by Laura or Niamh because in the summer of 1994 I had yet to set foot through the hallowed doors of Derry’s most popular hot spot. It would be another year, and some, before I would finally lose my Squires virginity and join the heaving masses on the dance floor, giving it everything to ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ by D:Ream. The fact that the lead singer of D:Ream is a Derry man gave that song a much longer shelf life in our pubs and clubs than anywhere else. In fact, I’m sure they might still play it now.

We poke through other detritus of our teenage years – bus tickets, button badges with the CND symbol on them, a pair of love beads. We fancied ourselves as free-spirited hippy types when the truth was that the closest we came to being hippies was choking on Sandalwood incense and having to convince my mother it wasn’t in fact weed, as she suspected.

There’s an empty tube of Rimmel Heather Shimmer lipstick – the remnants of the glittery shade scraped out. We made things last back then.

‘You can still get that,’ Laura says of the shade that was ubiquitous in every cool girl’s make-up bag through the nineties.

‘No way,’ I say, immediately conjuring the colour in my mind’s eye and remembering the smokey-eyed, dark-lipped look that made anyone with a truly Irish complexion look like the undead.

Laura takes her phone from her pocket and taps at the screen before turning it and flashing it in front of my face. ‘See! Rimmel Heather Shimmer! Still on sale! I bought some for Robyn, but I don’t think she was impressed. It’s probably lying somewhere in the midden she calls a bedroom.’

‘You should retrieve it and steal it for yourself. Go old-school vintage with your bad self,’ Niamh says, with a laugh.

‘I think I’m just regular old these days,’ Laura says. ‘Things are starting to sag that did not sag before. And hair is growing in all the wrong places. I’m afraid I’ll wake up one of these mornings to a full beard. We’ll not even talk about the grey hair…’

‘I don’t know why I never realised that the hair on your head isn’t the only hair that goes grey,’ I say, blushing.

‘Oh yes!’ Niamh says. ‘I’m not over the trauma of having a badger stripe down there.’

I snort in response.

‘Tell me this,’ Laura says. ‘When all our other hair is turning grey, then why do the beardy whiskers come in thick and black? And how do they arrive on our faces already two inches long as if they’ve been there for weeks or months?’

‘As if we needed any further proof that God is a man,’ Niamh says. ‘No female god would put any woman through menopause and make us watch our bodies sag and wrinkle in front of our own eyes. And what do men have to deal with while we’re in hormone hell? A finger up the bum once a year to check their prostate? There’s men who would pay good money for that. Oh, and sagging balls. That’s it. That’s their lot!’

The image of a sagging ball sack dances through my mind and I grimace. Although, much like the virginal ‘Position of the Fortnight’ guru I was in 1994, I have no direct experience of sagging balls. In fact, it’s been quite some time since I’ve had any experience of balls at all. Simon’s were the last pair I had been up close and personal with and I’ve long come to accept that will more than likely stay the case for the rest of my days.

‘Nothin’ worse,’ Laura splutters, choking on her wine. I watch her closely, seeing the moment she remembers, of course, that there are greater tragedies in this world than the natural life cycle of male genitals and sobers up briefly.

I reach across and give her hand a little squeeze. ‘It’s okay to laugh, you know. Your mum loved a good laugh – especially at inappropriate moments.’

‘She did enjoy a good testicles joke,’ Laura sniffs, wiping a tear from her eye. ‘I was lucky with her, wasn’t I? She was the best of them.’

‘She was,’ Niamh says solemnly and I nod my head, aware that we have missed out on so much of each other’s lives. Here Laura had been caring for her mother in her final months and neither Niamh nor I had known about it until it was too late to be of any real help.

‘Do you want to talk about what happened?’ I ask gently.

Laura shakes her head and takes another long drink of wine. ‘I absolutely do not want to talk about it, but at the same time I think I need to talk about it. Conal’s been great. Even Aidan’s been great, but it’s not the same as talking about it with my girls.’

Guilt nips at me, knowing we have not been ‘her girls’ for a long time now, but I had felt I’d no choice back then. She had let me down so badly.

‘We’re always here when you want to vent,’ Niamh soothes, and she’s right of course, because regardless of what is nipping at me I know that Laura needs us to be her friends right now. She’s just lost the woman who raised her single-handedly. The only parent she really ever knew.

‘She was unwell for a long time,’ Laura says. ‘Breast cancer. We thought she had beaten it but the kind she had was a sneaky wee bastard. It kept creeping back and not giving her any peace. She fought as hard as anyone could’ve fought. Lost her breasts, and her hair. Never her sense of humour, mind. She kept that right until the end when it was all too much. I bet you didn’t even realise that was a wig she had on her in the coffin? She told me she would come back and haunt me if I didn’t put her best wig on her and make her look beautiful.’

Laura is speaking so tenderly and yet the pain in her voice is evident. I know it only too well. I had the same pain in my voice when my father died. It’s the kind of crack in you that can never be fixed so you just learn to live with it and adapt to its sharp edges.

‘She did look beautiful,’ I reassure my friend who nods.

‘It was the best she’d looked in months,’ Laura said. ‘Did I tell you that Robyn helped me do her make-up? The funeral home did all the foundation stuff – they’ve special make-up for that you know. To keep them fresh looking.’ She grimaces slightly. ‘But Robyn and I did her eyes, and her blusher and lipstick. It was very special, you know. Three generations of women together in the room. Just us. We joked we should go full goth or drag queen. I said I’d grab her old Dolly Parton wig from the cupboard and go all out. Mum would’ve loved that, I think. It would’ve given the neighbours something to talk about. But we decided less was more, in the end.’

The thought of Robyn having the maturity and wherewithal to help her mother with this most tender of tasks bring a tear to my eye. I look at the time capsule – at the silly mementoes of the carefree life we had at sixteen and I think of Robyn, the same age, supporting her mother so sensitively. It’s hard to believe the babies who crawled around our feet are now well on their way to adulthood and making us so very proud.

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