2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie (44 page)

“Oh, no.”

“When I couldn’t find the wedding photos anywhere I knew something was up. So I rang Sylvana last weekend and she confirmed it for me.”

“I had to tell her, Julie,” Sylvana says. For the first time in years, vulnerably.

“Is that why you fed Ronan the fishpaste, Mother? Because you knew what he was up to?”

Mother, grinning: “Yes. But also because young men like him need to eat good, wholesome food.”

“But what I find incredible, Mother, was that you
told
him.”

“It was the best part, I admit.”

Amid the general merriment, Mother lays into my redcurrant-custard tart. I point out that it’s mine. She points out that I said I didn’t want any. And she just keeps on eating.

“Have a bite, Sylvana,” she says. “I don’t want to be greedy.”

Sylvana calmly steals a forkful.

You know, it would be almost amusing if it weren’t such a delicious-looking tart. My appetite is beginning to return and Mother dear is monopolizing my dessert, stuffing herself with it like this smiling greed machine. She feels she’s lived and suffered long enough in this world, and the time for depriving herself of its luxuries is now over. So she has to deprive me of them instead. But she eats in such a civilized way you’d never guess we’re touching base animal instinct here: slowly she separates a modest piece from my plate, slowly she raises the fork, slowly she places the fork in her mouth, slowly she chews. So slowly, you’d swear she was born into nobility.

Still, mothers are wise beings who have suffered so much torment in this life that mere minutes in their company can make you jolly again. Let her, I tell myself.

The three of us spend the next hour lambasting men.

Definitely one of life’s coolest pastimes.

In the end, Mother manages to coax me back home with her. When we get inside and she puts me sitting at the kitchen table, I burst into floods of tears because I can still smell Ronan everywhere around me. She pours me a cup of tea and while I am drinking it she makes this huge racket washing some plates in the sink, just as if she’s drilling a hole through a granite quarry. When she’s finished she dries her hands and pours herself a cup of tea, brings it over and sits down beside me.

A fixed, determined look has appeared on her face. “Julie, I want you to make a decison here and now.”

“What kind of decision?” says I, beginning to panic.

She sighs.

Feel free, she advises me, to weep my heart and lungs out. Feel free, she prods, to bang my head for three hours against the wailing wall and curse my very existence and have an extended stamping tantrum. Feel free, she lectures, to weep despairingly into my pillow and mourn the loss of the person I used to call my husband, and feel free generally to steep myself in my own soggy, mournful bath of misery and hopelessness and self-beatery, and feel free to desire death from a broken heart…

Provided
, she warns, I confine the woe-is-me session to the next thirty-six hours.

“Why?” I ask fearfully.

I mean, considering that one gets such a kick out of being miserable, why on earth would one want to confine it to a limited edition of thirty-six hours?

“Because on Monday morning you’re going back to work.”

“Hold on a second, Mother.”

Monday morning at seven thirty sharp, she announces, will be the beginning of the rest of my life. She will haul me out of my bed by the toenails if she has to, she says.

So between now and then, I have thirty-six hours to rant. Ronan is worth that, she says, but certainly no more. She refuses to allow me to eat my heart out when it’s his heart that deserves to be eaten out. She says that she herself wasted too many years deciding that Father wasn’t worth wasting so many years on, and she really doesn’t see why I can’t learn the lesson in one and a half days.

I know she’s right. Working is good because it gets your mind off things. It keeps you strong. It reminds you that even if your life is breaking down and your marriage up – nevertheless you’re not a total dump site.

And I’ll admit that I enjoy certain aspects of the law, especially personal injuries. It’s mostly males who suffer. Seeing men in pain is a welcome distraction from the tragedy of life.

Maybe I haven’t woken up yet, maybe it’s going to hit me. I don’t know. Maybe Mother is just lowering a rope ladder down the pit to me, so that when the enormity of what’s happened kicks in properly, I’ll have something to cling on to.

“And by the way, dear, I’ve been thinking.”

“What?”

“I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

“Go on.”

“Two hundred thousand for the apartment.”

I stare at her, aghast.

“
This
apartment?”

“Take it or leave it,” she says.

T
here’s no doubt about it.

It is who I think it is.

Ambling through the park.

Here I am, standing on the roof garden of my apartment, hanging up clothes to dry on this cold and breezy winter morning. I’m extracting damp shirts and tops, and other exquisite articles, from a basket squatted on top of a stool. When suddenly this apparition drops from the sky.

Everything stops. I was just on the point of attaching a peg to the second trouser leg, so right now an idle peg is sticking from my fingers like a duck’s beak ready to bite.

It seems to be a pattern in my life: things are cruising along just nicely when without warning I’m struck by an avalanche of bad luck.

I am jinxed from birth. I must be. In my body is a constellation of stellar minerals whose cumulative magnetic effect is to attract all the woe of the world – but precisely at that point in time when things in my life appear to be running nice and smoothly.

Suddenly the avalanche of bad luck starts waving.

Feeling like I’ve just been shot at, I turn my back and pin up the second trouser leg like I didn’t notice a thing, hoping the move looked convincing.

Will I ever be free?

First, the innocence and peace of your childhood destroyed by your father’s affair. Then you and your mother together pick up the pieces, worn and brittle and blood-and-tear-stained, and you live out the rest of your adolescence in a meteorological depression of the soul – but at least without a man to stymie it up on you.

Then you go to college and meet one.

You meet one and marry your addiction, and live on a high for a few years, plan babies and suddenly you discover he’s been doing the dirty on you. You take a nosedive. You try to cope, to rehabilitate, to forget – and what happens?

Your front doorbell rings.

I don’t want to know.

I extract a soggy white top from the basket and attach it to the line by two further pegs. I like pegs in winter: they don’t carry tiny spiders that spin webs on your clothes line to trap unsuspecting miniature airborne wildlife. I have a phobia about cobwebs and all they imply.

The bell rings again.

I don’t want to know
.

I feel like a seagull with a broken wing, but that’s okay. That’s okay because my wings are getting stronger by the week and even if I can’t yet spin in the air, or do a loop, or a roll, or a dive, or astronavigate the heavens like an eagle, I can at least parachute to safety if I get a sudden blackout and hide in a corner like a fragile kitten, and Sylvana and Mother will be there with their conjoint fat feline tongues to wrap me in a protective layer of their dripping saliva.

The very knowledge that this particular contribution to my emotional welfare is at all times forthcoming makes me certain that I will make it through this dark night of the soul.

Saint Julie of the Cross.

But still.

Still, I’m not strong. I’m still not fully myself. I might be strong enough to cruise in the sky, but only at low altitude. I’m still in constant danger of getting splatted against a chimney, or sprangled against a TV mast, or sliced in half by a cable, or scraped by a treetop or cymballed by a satellite dish (
Feng Shui
is quite right about the negative effects of satellite dishes). I am still fearful of getting nauseous and passing out as I fly through the septic urban air but my parachute fails to open, so I just get splodged on to the pavement like a grave of dogshit and never reawaken to immortalize the memory.

This, precisely, is the reason I do not want to answer the door.

The bell rings a third time.

I just want this interference to go away and leave me in peace. I will survive just fine, provided people whom I’d rather see frozen in a glass cabinet and dispatched to Mars would not decide suddenly to reappear in avalanche form.

I extract a clump consisting of three pairs of frilly white knickers from the washing basket and hang them up in turn, deeming each one no more deserving than a single peg.

It’s been truly awful for the last six months. Why do you think Sylvana and Mother still take it in turns to sleep over? Because I’m back on the rails?

Clearly it’s because they still don’t trust me not to end it all in a bubble bath. I have been a burden on them, a blight in their lives. Like a street littered with misery, they’ve been picking me up whenever I was down. At one point it got so bad that I begged Sylvana to leave me alone and not stay over any more. Because if I hated what I was doing to myself, I hated even more what I was doing to her. But, like all great friends, she refused to listen.

Mother, too, was an angel, in her very own inimitable way.

But a suicide trough there still was. I had a lot of good ideas about how to do myself in. But the most obvious idea of all – flinging myself off the terrace in front of the park – never quite materialized. I suppose I didn’t want to upset Sylvana – considering she often stayed over to thwart precisely that result and she’d have ended up blaming herself.

Or perhaps it was because in my heart I didn’t really want to do anything stupid – I just wanted to contemplate death from another angle to prove to myself that life was still worth living.

Or possibly the real reason I didn’t jump off the balcony was that it would finish Mother off. Now Mother is bad enough in a confined space like an apartment or a car, but can you imagine what it would be like sharing a grave? A sheer nightmare. Yes, she’s the ultimate reason I resolved to stay alive.

But close to death I did come one day. I had been drinking, that old reliable excuse for everything in the world that is excessive, to which I gratefully resort when rational behaviour becomes a burden. I wrote a suicide note to Ronan, care of Lucien Morel. In it, I blamed him for driving me to my death. Tripping over myself with inebriation, I posted it in the local postbox for early collection the following morning. Then I drove round the suburbs looking for something blank to crash into.

I could not find a suitable wall.

Either there were children playing tennis or football against it, or there were lamp-posts or cars in the way. Or dogs (cf. my innate fondness for wildlife). Or someone was in the vicinity: it was important to me that nobody would be ogling me in the process of bleeding to death, slumped over the wheel, body crushed, face smashed, wheezing my last blood-curdled breath. I did not fancy being trapped in gyrated metal, surrounded by people combing my hair and foundationing my face and snapping cameras at me for a complimentary front-page grin in the
News of the World
.

Finally I found a wall.

But.

It was situated at the end of a housing estate. It was perfect but for one thing: I had only thirty feet to accelerate up to eighty miles an hour. The worst I could do to myself was give myself a painful whiplash and a bit of light bruising.

I was desperate.

I gave up and came home.

Then I remembered the letter.

That whole night I did not sleep a wink. No way was Ronan getting that letter. The following morning I took up sentry duty at the postbox from six a.m. – though the first collection wasn’t until eight. When the postman finally arrived I begged him for the return of my letter.

“I’m not permitted to return a letter, miss.”

“It’s a suicide note,” I said quite calmly, though still treacherously drunk and whacked with fatigue.

“It’s still not permitted, miss.”

I screamed at the poor man and after a brief interlude I asked him politely to consider whether I was or was not dead.

It did not take him long to take out a bunch of letters and start flipping through it for one addressed to Ronan Fitzgerald.

Which he handed me.

Which I promptly burnt in the sink. Washing the last ashes down the drain, it suddenly occurred to me what a dumb fool I was not to have searched out the docklands: there, there were literally hundreds of walls to choose from, walls of all shapes and sizes and colours and degrees of blankness.

Doubly grief-laden, I went to bed (in my marital home) for two whole weeks, despite Mother’s valiant efforts to motivate me through pep talks, coffee, chocolate cake, bribery, threats, starvation, Xanax, prayer. She was so worried she even tried piano therapy.

Then one morning Sylvana came to me with coffee and Danish pastries. I felt sufficiently strong in myself to tell her about my suicide exploits. She attempted to comfort me by insisting that the impulse to destroy myself was not a permanent feature of my being but more of a ‘temporary blip in my sanity’. I thanked her for her enlightenment, I remember, turned over on my other side and told her to buzz off.

There was this deathly silence from the far side of the bed that made me actually want to turn round and see if I’d hurt her feelings – but I was too proud to do so. That’s when I realized I wanted to live.

I am now over this sad period in my life. Thanks in large part to my wonderful friend who refused to abandon me even when I begged her to. And thanks, of course, to Mother.

The bell rings a fourth time. This is bordering on harassment.

I twine down the spiral staircase with my empty basket.

I can’t face it.

I can’t.

I
will
face it.