Page 5 of The F*cking Fabulous Forties Club

That’s when another memory comes back to me. It was the summer of 1994. We were post GCSE, on the brink of womanhood and still dodging anything remotely cool. Although in fairness, both Laura and Niamh were making strides towards coolness by occasionally getting past the bouncers and into Squires nightclub. As such behaviour was very strictly verboten in my house, I instead doubled down on the dorkyness and suggested our summer project be putting together a time capsule.

‘These are the formative years of our lives,’ I had declared with all the conviction of a sixteen-year-old who thought she knew everything. ‘We should keep a record of them. We should mark this occasion.’

So we did. And if I’m not very much mistaken, the resulting creation is still buried in the back of the wardrobe in my old bedroom. Unless, that is, my mother has decluttered it in her attempts to put her affairs in order.

‘Mum,’ I ask. ‘Do you remember that time the girls and I made a time capsule?’

‘God, love, I barely remember my own name these days. And you lot were always up to something.’ She fills the kettle to make more tea, even though she has just cleaned away the cups. She’s definitely more rattled than she’s letting on.

‘You must remember,’ I tell her. ‘You came up with some ideas of what we could put it in. I’m pretty sure it’s upstairs in my old room somewhere. Unless you’ve decluttered it over the years?’

She pauses for a moment as if trying to pull the memory from the back of her mind and place it in the here and now. I watch her closely, waiting for the ‘penny dropping’ moment to appear across her face. It doesn’t.

‘Nope. No memory of it. But I do know that I’ve not touched that wardrobe of yours. If you stored something in it then, chances are, it’s still there.’

‘Great,’ I say, a little fizz of excitement bubbling inside me, mixed with a little bit of deep cringe at how utterly lacking in any kind of cool we were. What other sixteen-year-olds spent their summer holidays making time capsules – for fun?

Still, the cringe isn’t strong enough to stop me from hightailing it to my old bedroom and starting to dig through the wardrobe. I come across old photo albums, which have half the pictures missing. I vaguely remember pulling them out at different stages to plaster on the walls of my university digs, or in my first flat. I’m not sure what became of them after that. I find a box of my old school books – my spidery handwriting in blotchy blue biro scrawling my class name and the name of my teachers. I swear there is still the faint whiff of the damp temporary classrooms at the back of the school. A mixture of mould, varnish and chalk dust. Another box yields the black pair of two-and-a-half-inch heels I wore to my school formal in Upper Sixth. I remember thinking they were so high I feared I’d topple off them. Today’s formal attendees would laugh at me from atop their four-inch platform heels. Or they’d style it out and wear Converse under their prom dresses and everybody would think they were absolute style icons.

Eventually, at the very back of the wardrobe, under a fine layer of dust, I find it.

A dusty shoebox sealed with thick, now-yellowed sticky-tape. Pulling it out, part of me is surprised it doesn’t disintegrate as soon as it hits the light. How long must it have been there, hiding away? If it was the summer after our GCSEs then that was 1994 which means… Oh God… it’s almost time to open it.

Glancing down at the box, I see our names signed on the lid. There’s me – spelling my name Becki, with an i, because I thought it was cool. There’s Niamh’s name, in purple biro, of course. Subtlety was never her strong point. And then, in swirly, feminine letters is Laura, with a little love heart drawn after her name. Just the sight of it is enough to make my heart break for what she is going through, and for the friendship we lost along the way.

It’s then I spot the instructions, written in purple glitter ink, along the side of box. ‘DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 2024! WAIT THIRTY YEARS!’

Close enough, I think.

4

PANDORA’S SHOEBOX

The time capsule is sitting on the passenger seat of the car as I drive home, still somewhat dazed by the news of Kitty O’Hagan’s passing. She was the best of women – always delighted to see us arrive. She seemed to thrive when her house was full of rowdy teenagers and God love her, but she listened to all of our drama and never once told us to wise up. She was ten years younger than my own mother, and infinitely cooler. She had her hair bleached blonde and even had it cut like Rachel from Friends, whereas Roisin Burnside opted for a boring brown bob, liberally sprinkled with grey. My hand moves to my own hair, now a carbon copy of my mother’s, circa 1994. I blush. Is that part of the reason Saul and Adam couldn’t wait to get away? Because their mother is an old woman who doesn’t even seem to try any more…?

No. No I won’t make this about me. This is about Kitty and Laura. Poor Laura. I’ll log into Facebook, which my sons fondly call Boomerbook, when I get home and look her up. Maybe I’ll send her a message? But is a social media message appropriate in the circumstances? I worry just showing up at the wake to offer my condolences might be awkward. We haven’t spoken in so long, and we didn’t part on particularly great terms. I can’t guarantee I’ll be welcome. Then again, I’m sure right now Laura has bigger things to worry about than me showing my face. Maybe Niamh and I could go together though – and morally support each other.

I tap the button on my steering wheel that activates voice controls in the car and very slowly and concisely tell my car to ‘Call Niamh’, who will no doubt know the best way to handle this. A robotic voice booms through my car asking me if I mean ‘Call Fergal’. My mind does gymnastics trying to figure out how on earth the word Niamh – soft and sweet – could possibly be confused with the double-syllabled harshness of Fergal. I also wonder who the hell Fergal is and why his number is in my phone.

‘No,’ I tell my car and repeat the instruction, slower and even more enunciated, to call Niamh.

‘Did you mean Lesley?’ it replies as I stop my car to allow an impossibly young and glamorous teacher help a group of children walking in pairs cross the road. I watch the children, holding hands and bundled up in big coats and hats laughing and chatting excitedly about whatever adventure they’ve just been on. I remember that used to be Laura, Niamh and me. We used to insist we be allowed to walk three abreast as there was no way we would want to be split up.

A shitstorm of emotion that has been building since my mother broke the news about Kitty comes pouring out of me in a verbal attack on a computer chip located somewhere in my car, or my phone or a satellite somewhere because Lord above knows I have no idea how technology works any more.

‘No. I do not want to call fudging Lesley,’ I shout. ‘If I wanted to call fudging Lesley, I’d have said fudging Lesley, and not fudging Niamh but no, you can’t fudging understand a Derry accent, can you? Because it’s not fudging English or American and really, Niamh is a fudging common enough name here and through the entire island of Ireland, and I’m fairly fudging sure I speak in a fudging intelligible manner so maybe you should address your fudging bias!’

(For the purposes of clarity, I should point out that I did not use the word ‘fudging’ but I’m trying to tell this story politely.)

Red-faced with effort and a hot flush, I slam my hands on the steering wheel and take a deep breath just in time to see the aforementioned young and glam teacher staring at me through my windscreen, mouth agape, along with the last of her charges who share her same wide-eyed stare of disbelief.

Of course, I realise, I’d put the window of the car down to try and fight off the hot flush. Which meant those sweet innocent children have heard my tirade. Every fudging last word.

All I can do is babble a quick but heartfelt apology and drive off, embarrassment adding to the ruddiness of my cheeks. When I get home I send Niamh a quick WhatsApp message asking her to call me when she gets a free moment between classes, before taking Daniel out to the back garden to deal with his ablutions.

How he has anything left to evacuate from his body is a mystery to me, but he manages it all the same and I’m delighted to see it is solid in form and easy to scoop. I’m half-way through messaging my mother to update her on that dog’s health when I remember her delicate stomach, and also that no sane person messages people about their dog’s poo.

Is this what I have become? The mad, red-faced lady who swears in front of children and gets excited at a solid poo from my dog? It was bad enough when the boys were tiny and talk of poo – consistency, colour and odour – was par for the course among the mummy brigade. But I’m forty-six and this is a dog. He boops his wet snout against my hand in what I like to think of as a sign of affection and I look at his big brown eyes staring up at me with what I’d like to think is love. ‘At least someone cares about me,’ I say, self-pity knocking me sideways as I lead him back indoors and set about preparing him some freshly bought, definitely not poisonous, chicken and white rice to eat. That’s when my phone rings and I see ‘Niamh’ flash on the screen.

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