Page 24 of The F*cking Fabulous Forties Club

Laura

Tonight then? Even teatime? I’ll bring chippy chips. Chippy chips make everything better.

Me

It’s a deal. I have white bread, real butter and red sauce here so we can make chip butties.

Laura

Perfect. Thanks girls. I’ll see you then.

Niamh

Hang in there, kid. We’ve got your back.

My phone falls silent and I resume my article, wondering if it would go down well if I wrote ‘give your employees chippy chips, as this makes everything better’. This job would be so much easier if I could just cut through the bullshit and get directly to the heart of the matter. I bet more people would read chip-related advice than some nonsense about encouraging an atmosphere of flexibility and dedication to the customer base, which actually translates as sucking up worsening working conditions.

Maybe I’ll add the chip-related advice to my ‘Ten Ways to Survive Your Forties’ pitch.

‘Make sure to eat chippy chips, or pizza, or ice cream on a semi-regular basis. It won’t kill you and it will make you feel like you’re treating yourself. Diet advice is all well and good, but resist the urge to suck all the food-related joy out of life. Yes, a beautiful, from-scratch, low carb, high protein plant-based dinner can be tasty and can have health benefits but it’s not a chip butty, is it? Sometimes you need to bring out the big guns.’

Or something like that.

Daniel lets out a low rumbling growl. I imagine he’s telling me to quit dreaming about chips and just get on with my actual work and not my long-shot of a magazine pitch. Those tasty chicken chews he loves so much aren’t going to pay for themselves, after all.

‘Okay,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll do it!’

He gives a half-hearted wag of his tail, which I read as ‘Finally! A good decision!’ before I focus back on the task at hand and he gives in to his sixth nap of the day.

But as much as I try to focus on my work, I can’t help but think about Laura, and what it was in her letter that might have upset her so much. She’s probably just having the same crisis of confidence that I am. With added grief, of course. I remember those raw early days only too well. They were a fever dream where I felt as if I’d had the very skin flayed from my body. Everything hurt. Every single thing felt like a personal attack. The chill in the air. The brightness of the sun. The songs that played on the radio. They didn’t even have to be sad songs – in the thick of grief everything becomes sad and is assigned more meaning. Everything serves as a reminder of what has been lost. I bawled in Tesco when ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ by Phil Collins started playing because someone once told me my father looked like Phil Collins. He absolutely did not, for the record. I think that someone was talking about another person entirely. He certainly wasn’t talking about my father who had been a tall, thin man with glasses, a thick grey beard, and zero drumming ability. But in Tesco, on that particular day, the rawness of my loss had me bent double.

I’d left my shopping in the trolley in the middle of the aisle and hurried to my car where I’d promptly had a panic attack. Saul and Adam got to order a pizza for tea that night and were delighted with themselves, while I’d done my best to keep the strength of my grief from them. The last thing they needed was to see me to lose my emotional shit on a regular basis. No, it seems I was saving that particular treat for when perimenopause kicked in.

I must make sure that Laura knows she doesn’t have to keep any of her pain to herself. It’s a shite truth that the only way to learn how to co-exist with grief is to allow yourself to live in it fully, feeling every awful shard as it comes. Just as you can’t hurry love, you also can’t hurry grief.

I bet you sang that last bit.

17

A LITTLE SPARK

‘I probably shouldn’t be eating this,’ Laura says, loading a second slice of bread with thick, greasy chips which are scenting the air of my living room with their perfect vinegar-heavy aroma. ‘I swore once the funeral was over, I’d get back to eating properly. Our freezer is full with lasagnes and casseroles that the neighbours dropped in to Mum over the last couple of months. There were so many we became the official overflow zone.’

‘I do love a good lasagne,’ Niamh says, squeezing the bottle of tomato ketchup so tightly it makes the same noise as a watery fart.

‘You can have whatever you want from my house. Or Mum’s freezer. She’s not going to have much use for them now, and Conal says he can’t bear to even look at them. He’s taken to referring to her freezer contents as the “pot luck of impending death”,’ Laura says. ‘I don’t think either of us will be able to look at a lasagne the same way ever again.’

I nod. ‘I remember from when my dad died. But it wasn’t lasagne – he went too quick for the neighbours to start batch cooking and stockpiling. It was the egg and onion sandwiches that were made on an industrial level by my aunties and cousins to feed the mourners. I used to love a good egg and onion. Of all the food that gets offered to at a wake to go with your cup of tea, they were my favourite. I even liked them more than the pastries Erin and Flora at the bakery on Ivy Lane sent up. But now they just remind me of death.’

‘They smell a bit like death too,’ Niamh says, with a soft smile and a wrinkle of her nose.

‘But they are lovely, all the same. Maybe you’ll warm to them again in time,’ Laura says before taking a large bite from her chip butty and immediately melting into a semi-orgasmic state as a trickle of melted butter runs down her chin. She wipes it away hastily, finishes chewing and laughs. ‘Excuse me for being such a hallion. But these are so good, even if my waistline will regret it later,’ she says.

I look at my friend, still just about as slim as she was when we were teenagers. Okay, she may now be nudging more towards a twelve rather than the svelte size ten she had been, but she’s nowhere near needing to worry about her waistline. I, on the other hand, probably should be worried about mine, but in the spirit of helping young me love myself again, I’m just going to push the worry aside for a bit. I know I’m never going to have a flat stomach and I made my peace with that a long time ago. After all, I never actually had a flat stomach in the first place. The pot belly my mother lovingly referred to during my childhood just continued to grow with me, and then, after gestating the twins – both in excess of five pounds when they were born – I knew the battle was forever lost.

‘Nonsense,’ Niamh says, cutting through my thoughts. ‘It’s actual science that calories consumed during the grieving process do not count. And I’m a science teacher so I speak with authority.’

‘See!’ I say. ‘So eat up and enjoy it.’

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