Page 25 of Beautiful Losers

‘Huh?’ I said.

‘Oh yes. Therapy. Your Auntie Linda, the one who lives in Boston? You met her once. She was the one with the Bell’s palsy. The left side of her face was like a mudslide. She says therapy is all the rage among Americans nowadays. They’re wondering why they’re so miserable, so they pay a stranger to tell them their mother didn’t play with them enough when they were a child or make a fuss of their artwork. I’m sorry, but like I’ve always said, if you’re not going to produce your best work it’s not going on the fridge.

‘Honestly, you’ve no idea what it’s like, theresponsibility of motherhood. The constant cleaning and the laundry.’

I was going to point out that Joan had been doing the cleaning and the laundry for the past three years, but didn’t feel such information would be well received at this time.

‘To be honest, it’s a wonder I’ve lasted this long,’ she continued, turning to face me now. She looked like she’d been crying, although it was hard to tell with Mum. There was always a hydrous look to her eyes, her most striking feature. We went on holiday to Dog’s Bay in Connemara when I was seven and I remember thinking how much my mother’s eyes were like the water. A turquoise-green that seemed out of place somehow, an exoticism that didn’t belong in the landscape. Mum’s eyes are the only thing I inherited from her. Not her long limbs or delicate features, the sort of looks that made people stop in the street. (A man once followed us around the lingerie section of Arnott’s, gawping at Mum. She threatened to call security, which we both knew was a lie. She enjoyed the attention. She talked about nothing else on the bus home.) The rest of me is my father – pale skin that burns at the first glint of sunlight and a hooked nose, which, when I’m being generous to myself, I’d say is vaguely Streisand-esque, though most days I feel like Owen Wilson in a wig.

‘I love you, Fiadh, you know that, don’t you? But I’m done,’ said Mum. ‘This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.’

My mother didn’t finish school. Her nemesis, Sister Margaret, regularly smacked her across the backside with whatever classroom paraphernalia was to hand. Mum admitted she was a ‘challenging’ student (as Yiv liked to say, I didn’t lick it off the back of a spoon). That said, there were limits to howmuch she was prepared to endure. One day, after Sister Margaret narrowly missed her with a duster, she stood up, walked out of the classroom and never went back. She told her parents she was going to be an actress and took the boat and train to London a week later.

She got a job in a printers’ shop in Camden and moved into a house share with a critical-care nurse from Trinidad and a Pakistani construction worker. Every evening, over dinner, they’d swap stories about which one of them, that day, had been told to fuck off back to where they came from, and they’d laugh, because had the British taken their own advice and fucked off back home when they were building their empire, none of them would be there in the first place.

Mum spent eighteen months auditioning for roles. The closest she got to landing a job was a call-back for Kraft Singles cheese slices. After rejecting the director’s offer of a drink, she was told her performance wasn’t believable, that she had failed to convince him that Kraft really did have freshness all wrapped up. She moved back to Ireland and met my dad in a pub on her first night in Dublin. He was floored by the bombshell in the zebra-print coat and foreign accent (Mum hailed from Derry, north of the border) and told her he was going places, that he’d take her with him. She was less enamoured by the builder’s apprentice, but she liked his confidence. More than that, she liked his conviction that she was this rare and special thing.

They got married at City Hall six months later, Mum’s bump starting to show under her baby-blue spaghetti-strap dress and white ankle boots, and moved into a small terrace in Coolock. Dad was always working, doubling up onjobs. After a few years, he got a gig as a foreman on a construction site, saving enough to invest in a piece of land earmarked for development, on the advice of a couple of local councillors he’d befriended.

I remember good days. Mum’s smile lighting up the room when she landed a small part in a play or commercial. Our trips to the library every Wednesday. We’d curl up on beanbags in the kids’ corner and she’d read me stories about pirates and dragons and a mummy elephant who just wanted five minutes’ peace. We ate Club biscuits in dens she made out of bedsheets in the living room and went on long walks of the city together. One Saturday, we walked all the way to Dublin Zoo. At the orangutans’ enclosure, we watched as Molly, the oldest of the bunch, defecated into her palm and threw it at the crowd before turning her back to us, shoulders hunched. Everyone laughed. Some took photos on their Nikon FAs. I looked at Mum. A solitary tear was running down her cheek. The plaque beside the enclosure said that orangutans can live up to sixty years in captivity, ten years longer than in the wild. Mum said if longevity meant being so fucking depressed you shat into your own hands, she’d take her chances in the wild.

On the days Dad didn’t work late, he’d bring home battered cod from the chipper. He and Mum would drink amaretto sours, I’d have Shloer, and my parents would dance – to Blondie, Bowie, Kate Bush. I loved watching them dance together – the unselfconscious way Mum moved her body, the look on my father’s face. Pure disbelief. Like, how did I get this lucky? Like he’d discovered the secret to holding water in your hands.

I remember bad days. When Mum would comehome from a big audition, a role that would put her on the map, the back of her hand stained with electric-blue mascara. I’d try to cheer her up with one of the stories I’d written in school that day. She’d tell me to leave her alone, that she was going to run away and join a free-sex commune. (I never understood why she didn’t get more work. She always knew how to give a performance.) She’d start preparing dinner, banging tins of sweetcorn and peeling spuds so hard the blade would fall off.

For the most part, Dad was the cause of Mum’s moods. Specifically, all the time we spent waiting for him while he schmoozed local politicians and businessmen. Chilli fries going cold at Eddie Rocket’s. Eating our popcorn in the foyer of the cineplex, listening to the audience inside gasp at the special effects inJurassic Park. After she had to cancel dinner plans with friends when he failed to come home to look after me, Mum lost it. I could hear them shouting at each other from my bedroom. I tiptoed downstairs and saw Mum yank the phone out of its socket and hurl it at my father’s head. She was saying she never wanted any of this, lifted the sterling silver framed photo of the three of us at my first holy communion and jabbed at it with her finger.

‘You want to know where I’ve been?’ Dad yelled, reaching into the inside pocket of his sports jacket. ‘I’ve been out making this! For us. For our family.’ He pulled out a thick bundle of fifty-punt notes tied in an elastic band and hurled it on the table. ‘I’m building a better life for us. The life you told me you wanted. Why can’t you ever be satisfied?’

She was satisfied – for a while. The dodgy investment Dad made had paid off and within a couple of years (thanks to further‘recommendations’ from his new friends),signs bearing the Murphy Group name were popping up on development sites all across Dublin’s north side. The summer I turned eleven, we left Coolock and moved across the river, to a six-bedroom double-fronted mansion with marble fireplaces and French doors opening out onto a cedar wood deck. My mother had never mentioned the importance of things such as marble fireplaces and French doors opening out onto a cedar wood deck, but once we moved, I was reminded of their significance daily.

I was sent to St Mary’s, with the daughters of horse trainers and diplomats, thoracic surgeons and someone whose father had inherited the family portable toilet business. We’d see these families at Sunday lunch, sitting regally at their usual tables in Dublin’s culinary institutions, restaurants that had been around longer than Irish independence. Dad would arrive in his pinstripe three-piece suits and smother hiscôte de boeufin ketchup, oblivious to the curled lips and elbow nudges.

I thought Mum would hate her new life as much as I did, laugh at the absurdity of this strange, impenetrable world with its myriad unspoken rules. But she tried so hard to be accepted by the women in the identikit beige homes and matching holiday villas on the Algarve. She stopped dancing to Kate Bush and bought a chrome pepper grinder. She even started making her own mayonnaise in the hope of hosting lunches. Nobody came. I’d arrive home from school to find the mayonnaise bowl upended in the sink and Mum banging tins of sweetcorn like she did in the old days, when she lost another audition. She couldn’t see that no matter how hard she tried, she was never going to be asked onto the parents’ committee or invited on spa days with the other mothers. She was a triplethreat, an unholy trinity of wrongness. We were gauche new money, a reminder to those who still had the power that Ireland was changing. Mum was a former actress (loose morals) and Northern Irish (trouble). It also didn’t help that she was a knockout and a good deal younger than the other mothers.

One day, at breakfast, after Mum had found out about a fancy dinner to raise money for the local rugby club, a dinner from which she and Dad were excluded, I grabbed her hand over the table and squeezed it. These people are mean and they all have the same boring hair, I said in my infinite pre-teen wisdom. You don’t need them. My mother studied me for several seconds.

‘You need to start behaving at school,’ she said. ‘Stop questioning your teachers, stop with the moral crusades. And make some decent friends, will you? You’ll go nowhere hanging around with that Chinese girl. Is it so hard to be normal, Fiadh?’

I opened my mouth to say something. To defend Yiv. To tell Mum that we used to laugh at normal. Nothing came out.

‘If there’s one thing you learn from me, let it be this,’ she said. ‘You think you’re different. That you have something to say that’s worth hearing. That may be the case, but no one is listening. Life is disappointment and loss and herd mentality, and it’s better you realise that now and learn how to play the game, so you have a shot at winning. Do you hear me?’

She stood up, tightened the belt on her dressing gown and made an appointment with the salon where all the school mums got their hair done.

~

‘You’re going to be fine,’ Mum said, checking her teeth for lipstick in the rearview mirror. ‘I won’t be living far way. I’m staying with a … friend for a while. You can visit whenever you like, though not for a few weeks as we’re having the decorators in. Do you want the heated seat on?’

I shook my head. I hadn’t said a thing since I got into the car, aware of what was expected of me, my silence the consent Mum had tacitly requested.

‘Let’s go home. I’ve made a beef casserole. Oh, and don’t say anything about this to your father. Not yet. He won’t take it as well as you. He’s not as resilient as my girl, eh?’

She gave me a wink and started the engine.

A week later, Yiv overheard some girls from our year gossiping by the gym lockers. Aideen Magee’s dad had left his wife and moved in with Mum.

~

---