Making It Up As I Go Along (8 page)

Personal shoppers. Yes. As Mam would say, it was
far from personal shoppers I was reared. All the same, I managed the superhuman feat of shutting
down the voice in my head which tells me,
You deserve nothing
, long enough to make an
appointment with a personal shopper – we’ll call her Alex – in a Large
Department Store in London (hereafter known as LDSIL).

I don’t know the kind of people who
normally use personal shoppers, but I suspected I wasn’t one of them. I thought they might
be very busy lady executives, or people who go to a lot of charity balls, people who simply
didn’t have time for traipsing around the shops.

I actually
like
traipsing around the
shops. But I was interested in forging a long-term relationship with a personal shopper for one
specific reason: shoes. Yes, shoes. Other things, also, hopefully, but specifically shoes.

Because I have very small feet … sorry
… hold on! Right now, can I stop people who want to tell me how lucky I am that I can buy
all my shoes in the cheapo children’s department. I am a short-arse and I need heels, I
need height. Children’s shoes are a) horrible, b) made of plastic, c) too low, and d) have
pictures of the Wiggles. I am not lucky at all.

Every spring and autumn, when the new shoes
arrive in the shops, I launch myself on the trail for the white truffle of shoes, the holy
grail: the size 35. But I don’t live in London, and Ireland
doesn’t stock any shoes smaller than size 37. (‘There isn’t the
demand,’ they tell me, while I reply, in despair, ‘But
I’m
demanding
them.’) And the chances of me accidentally being in London the lone day the pitifully few
size 35s arrive on the shelves are slim. My cunning plan was that a trusted personal shopper
would be my person on the ground to bag the 35s.

However, we were midway between new shoes
seasons, so I decided, for a bonding first date, to ask Alex to help me find a dress. A dressy
dress, but not too dressy, one that could go from the office to the red carpet, not that
I’d be going anywhere near a red carpet, but just in case. A dress like an Issa dress, but
not actually Issa, as I already had a shamefully high number.

So we met, and although she was very thin, she
didn’t call me darling. This pleased me. We went to the store café and she got me an
orange juice and quizzed me about what I liked and what my look was and what my size was, and
none of this was as easy as it sounds. Then she went away and I stayed sipping orange juice and
trying to do a sudoku and in fifteen minutes she returned and led me to a large,
off-the-beaten-track changing room crammed with dresses.

Thrilling? Yes, at least in theory. But in
practice it was not a success. The dresses were all dresses I’d noticed on a fact-finding
trawl earlier in the day. Nothing new or spectacular had been released from a secret vault for
the special customers. And nothing really worked. The Temperley dresses made me look like
Camilla Parker-Bowles – yes, I know everyone loves her and she can do no wrong now, but
there’s no denying that something about the set of her shins in a flared skirt calls to
mind a stag at bay. Or perhaps a sideboard.

The low-waisted Etro dress made me look like Toad
of Toad Hall, like I was all stomach. The Missoni dresses were heart-stoppingly
expensive. The DVFs were nice but a little safe, and, like I said, I already had far too
many Issa dresses.

Sweat broke out on my forehead and I was suddenly
filled with panic. I was
trapped
, trapped in this changing room with all these
expensive, unsuitable dresses, and I’d accepted a free orange juice. I
had
to buy
something. I was morally obliged to. Alex had gone to all this trouble … The room seemed
to become smaller and lower and the dresses seemed to cackle, as if taunting me.

In the end I bought an Issa dress – I
couldn’t, just
couldn’t
find the nerve to walk away with nothing –
and asked if I could make an appointment for the next time I’d be in London. (Shoe-time.)
She said she wasn’t taking appointments that far in advance and that she’d call. But
she didn’t, and as the time got closer, I rang and left a message. She didn’t get
back, so I rang and left another message. I rang again and it was on phone call four that it
dawned on me: Alex wouldn’t be calling me back. Oh my God … I’d been rejected
by my personal shopper!

Why? Why? Was I not stylish enough? Thin enough?
Had I not spent enough money? Should I have refused the orange juice? No answers were
forthcoming and I faced the frustrating, unpalatable truth: a person like me would never have a
personal shopper. Once again, Mammy Keyes was right. Feck’s sake!

First published in
Marie Claire
, October
2006.

I did a kettlebells class. Sweet baba Jay! What
happened was, one morning Himself – and this is a fairly regular thing – went off to
run up the vertical side of Lugnaquilla, the highest mountain in Wicklow (I’m fairly sure
it is, although I might have that wrong, but either way, it’s very high).

Himself is always at that lark. If he’s not
running up the sides of mountains, he’s going for fifty-kilometre hikes in the hills in
the dark (true fact) or doing them AWFUL wretched endurance yokes. In Ireland there’s one
called Hell and Back but you might be more familiar with Tough Mudder or similar – you
know, when they have to run through lakes and get electric shocks and carry concrete bollards
over twelve-foot-high walls and crawl on their bellies under a blanket of razor wire and
whatnot.

And it dawned on me that the disparity in our
fitness levels was becoming a bit of an unbridgeable gap and that it was time I took myself in
hand. So I did a little bit of research and discovered that a kettlebells class was being held
that very morning in the local gym in Bluepool. (In fairness, it mightn’t be called that
any more, but that’s what it was called when I was a teenager and these things tend to
stick.)

I gave them a ring to establish more details and
the lovely lady on the phone said the class lasted forty minutes and wasn’t too hard, so
along I went, only to discover that the lightest kettlebell was
eight kilograms
–
I mean, that’s well over a stone!

Which was bad, but there was
worse to come because the instructor – a very nice young man with tattoos and fancy facial
hair – said we’d be doing the class outside. Outdoors! At the best of times
I’m no fan of any space without a roof and walls and windows (preferably closed). But this
decision meant that my gasping, wheezing shame would be visible to all the people sitting on the
top deck of the number 4 bus. I should mention that the number 4 bus’s terminus directly
overlooks the all-weather pitch where we’d be doing our class. So the top-deck passengers
wouldn’t catch a quick glimpse of me as they whizzed by. Oh no. They could have a good
fifteen to twenty minutes, planked in a stationary position, able to study me and my cherry-red
face in great detail. Perhaps even, to bond with their fellow commuters as they studied my
‘form’:

‘She’ll never last the class.’

‘Mark my words, that one’s going to
take a tumble.’

‘Hold on! I’d say she’s going
to puke!’

‘You’re right, you’re right,
only a matter of time! I’m giving her four minutes.’

‘Put me down for three minutes
fifty.’

‘Two minutes thirty-five for me.’

Yes, they’d watch me as if they were
watching a very interesting-in-an-atrocious-way sporting event and emerge as firm friends.

Before the class started I realized that everyone
else – seven or eight women – knew each other and were regulars, and from earwigging
their conversations I gathered that their children all seemed to be in school with each other.
So I hovered on the edge of their bonded circle, smiling like the anxious, unfit gom I am.

Then off we went! Instructor Boy said we’d
start with a warm-up, and my experience of exercise-class warm-ups is of
doing grapevines and other sappy easy things, but there was none of that lark. Instead we
were made to do sideways-running along the four sides of the pitch. You know when you see
football teams training on the telly and they’re doing the sideways-running and then they
do that strange sprinting where they bring their knees up to their chests and then they bring
their heels up to their bums? Yes? Well, that’s what we had to do.

It was AWFUL and I thought I was going to die
from unfitness, but I couldn’t lose face, not with the people on the number 4 bus watching
me avidly. (I was too mortified to look directly at them, but I was always aware of a sea of
faces clustered the length of the bus, locked in rapt watchfulness.)

Then! We had to start flinging the kettlebells
around and I could hardly lift my eight-kilogram one, never mind swing it, and once I got it up
I couldn’t control it, and it was a mercy that I didn’t clatter myself in the head
and knock myself out, although I DID actually consider doing that, just to get out of doing the
rest of the class, in the same way that First World War soldiers would shoot themselves in the
foot and say that the gun had accidentally fired while they were cleaning it, so that they
wouldn’t be sent back to the front.

But I kept going, even though the class went on
for AN HOUR AND TWENTY MINUTES, and despite everything there was a great sense of camaraderie
and I liked the teacher and the other people and it was only six yoyos and there was a kind of
honesty about the whole thing I liked.

I’ve fashioned great plans to return but I
haven’t as yet, because with one thing and another … But I will! Yes! Almost
certainly! Perhaps …

mariankeyes.com
,
May 2014.

It seems like a thousand years ago now, but in
August last summer I was on holiday in Italy with my entire family. We were staying in a deeply
charming villa near a beautiful hilltop town called Cortona, and you know yourself –
Italy, sunshine, tomatoes, the funny pointy trees, saying ‘
Mi scusi
’
– it was
fabulous
.

Everyone had a little wish list: Seán wanted
to make pizzas from scratch; Oscar planned to learn to swim; I set myself the challenge of
trying every one of the forty-nine flavours of gelato in the Snoopy Gelateria; and
Caitríona, who lives in New York, was desperate to visit a designer outlet, an hour’s
drive from the villa.

All well and good, except she wanted me to
accompany her and the thing is, I can’t ABIDE designer outlets.

Yes, yes, I know most people love them and they
embark with an empty suitcase and return with a lovely new winter coat, three pairs of boots,
eight DVF dresses, a leather skirt, a Prada handbag and Tom Ford’s phone number, all for a
fiver. But there’s something wrong with me – I am Bargain Repellent. I never find
anything decent in the sales and more than once I’ve purchased something at full price,
only to observe helplessly, five short minutes later, the price being slashed in half. (A
subsection of being Bargain Repellent is that I’m the worst haggler on this earth and
often end up paying more than the opening figure from the vendor. I don’t know what
happens – figures bamboozle me and I’ve obviously got an eejity sort of a face
…)

Nevertheless, it
doesn’t mean that I
haven’t
bought stuff at designer outlets. I’ve
always felt that I sort of
had
to, that even if I didn’t like the stuff, because
it was a third of the original price it was my duty to make a purchase and on my return to
gather my loved ones around and display the spoils of my trip and instigate a game where
I’d tell them the original price of the items, as opposed to the vastly reduced ones I
actually paid, and we’d add up all the money I’d ‘saved’.

However, although I’ve put in time in the
likes of Bicester Village, Cheshire Oaks and Kildare Village, I can honestly say – even
though I’m given to exaggeration – I can
honestly say
that I have never
worn any of the garments I bought on those trips.

The way I see it, there’s a
reason
they never sold in the first place – basically because they’re horrible or
they’ve got three arms or no neck-hole or they’re a strange mustardy-khaki-ey colour
that you wouldn’t dress your worst enemy in. Quite literally, the only bargain that
I’ve ever got in a designer outlet was two turquoise Le Creuset saucepans in Kildare
Village that were 40 per cent less than the price in Brown Thomas. But that, my amigos, is
it.

So I wasn’t enthused about going to the
designer outlet with Caitríona. To make matters worse, I had actually visited the self-same
Italian designer outlet three years earlier and found it to be so dispiriting that I renamed it
‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’.

But she’s my sister and I love her and
Himself was commandeered to do the driving so I thought, ‘Ah shur, I’ll go along for
the drive and I can sit in the car and read my book while she’s looking at all the
rubbish.’ But I had to make my position clear and I said to her, ‘You do know that
“Designer Outlet” is an anagram of “Shite for Goms”?’

So off we went, Himself driving, and it
transpired that Caitríona
wasn’t just looking for a day out, but
that she was on a mission – to buy a pair of Hogan sneakers. (Hogan, for those of you who
mightn’t know, is a US company, the ‘little sister’ of Tod’s, and it
does shoes and bags and that sort of thing.) Yes, Caitríona was obsessing about Hogan
sneakers. They were all the go in New York, so she told me, but they were very pricey and she
was certain that she’d get them for half nothing at the Hogan shop in the outlet.

And you know, I must admit that my interest was
piqued. If these yokes were ‘all the go’ in New York, surely I should be paying
attention? So when we arrived at the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, instead of sitting in the car
like I’d said I was going to do, I decided to go along for a gawk.

Caitríona had hopped out before Himself had
even finished parking the car and she was walking very fast and she had to pause to consult the
map of the place but her leg was jigging and she was clearly coming up on an adrenalin surge and
she was muttering, ‘It’s this way, it’s somewhere over here,’ and then
she shouted, ‘There it is!’ and broke into a run.

Sure enough, there was the Hogan shop and myself
and Himself hurried in Caitríona’s wake and by the time we caught up with her she was
already down the back of the shop where there were MILLIONS of sneakers. Millions and millions
and millions of them in all kinds of colours – pink patent and cobalt suede and inky-navy
leather – but they were horrible. They had a profoundly strange rectangle-shaped toe and
they looked like the lace-up shoes that misfortunate, arthritic old ladies wear.

I was seized with cold fear. This was my sister,
my beloved sister – we agreed on
everything
, we liked and disliked
exactly
the same things
. But clearly she’d been living in New York for too long. Unbidden,
the memory swam into my head of how she
hadn’t liked
In
Bruges
, of how she just hadn’t ‘got’ it, when it was clearly such a
magnificent film. ‘I’m losing her,’ I thought, ‘I’m losing her and
it’s awful.’

Caitríona was prowling up and down, still
muttering to herself, and Himself gestured at the horrible sneakers and said, ‘As
we’re here, do you want to try a pair?’

As I’ve mentioned previously my feet are
size 35 – whenever I say this, people seem to think I’m boasting, as if I’m
saying something like, ‘Christ, I have the metabolism of a greyhound! No matter what I
eat, I just can’t seem to put on weight!’ But it is a bloody scourge having size 35
feet. Because a shoe in size 35 is rarer than a unicorn sighting.

Here in this Hogan place, though, there were
walls and walls of boxes of sneakers and more size 35s than you could count. However, because
all of them were horrible, I declined Himself’s offer and we both got out our phones and
went on Twitter, prepared for a lengthy wait.

But within moments, Caitríona was standing,
wild-eyed, before us.

‘They’re dearer than they were in
Venice,’ she declared. ‘They’re dearer than they are in New York! It’s a
fecking swizz!’

With all the compassion I could muster, I said
gently, ‘Shite for Goms, Caitríona, Shite for Goms.’

I put my arm around her shoulder and led her back
to the car, and the mood on the drive home was very subdued.

But anyway, she carried on as best she could and
tried her hardest to enjoy the rest of the week, and in all fairness it was very nice: Seán
made his pizzas and Oscar learnt to swim and I managed twenty-seven of the forty-nine gelato
flavours – and our goodbyes at Rome airport were very emotional.

And then I was home and facing into autumn, and
about a
week after we got back I was reading the Sunday paper when something
caught my eye: ‘Hogan sneakers sell out in minutes.’ I seized the page and read with
keen interest. Apparently, everyone fabulous in London was lusting after Hogan sneakers and
hand-to-hand combat had almost broken out in the shop in Sloane Street. Already they were being
sold for vastly inflated prices on eBay.

With trembling fingers I went on the internet and
discovered that it was all true, and I thought I was going to vomit. Suddenly I saw how
wrong
I’d been: the funny-shaped rectangular toe wasn’t horrible, it was
directional
,
it was
fashion-forward
! And to think I could have
bought twenty pairs of size 35s in a variety of colours and styles! What a fool I’d been,
what a ridiculous, clueless eejit!

I’d let a precious opportunity slip through
my fingers and it was unbearable. Worse, there was no one I could talk to because Himself was
away for the week (climbing Mont Blanc – can I just digress for a moment and say fair play
to him).

Almost in tears, I paced the house, trying to
quell the feelings of loss. I should have trusted Caitríona: she lived in New York, for the
love of God.
New York!
Of course she had her finger on the pulse!

‘This too shall pass,’ I repeated
over and over to myself, ‘this too shall pass.’

But the day went on and the grief – yes, it
was actual grief – didn’t abate. So I rang the Italian shop! Yes! And the person I
spoke to was snotty and pretended he couldn’t understand me and hung up on me
mid-sentence, and when I rang back, no one answered.

My despair increased – then suddenly I knew
what I needed to do. It was all very simple: I’d go back to Italy. Yes. No one need
know – I’d fly in and out in the one day. Yes. I’d get a
flight into one of them places – Rome, Palermo, whatever (my knowledge of Italy’s
layout is very sketchy).

And I’d hire a car. Yes. Granted,
I’ve never driven ‘out forrin’ and the prospect normally terrified me, but not
now. No. Like, how hard could it be? Admittedly the Autostrade were scary and the Italian
drivers were nutters, but surely to God I too could try to drive like a nutter?

Directions, now they were another thing that
could be tricky. I can barely tell my right from left, but where there’s a will
there’s a way, right? Maybe the hire car would have a sat-nav, even if I’ve never
managed to program one and even if I did it would be in Italian and beyond
Mi scusi
I
don’t understand a word of the language.

But I was going, of that I was certain. Central
to my plan was that no one must know: I was too embarrassed by my lunacy. Thursday would be the
best day – it was when Himself was doing the final ascent of the mountain, so he’d
be out of radio contact. I’d tell everyone else that I was ‘working hard’ and
couldn’t be disturbed, it’d all be grand. Grand.

So I started googling flights and I was a little
aghast at the cost – but, I rationalized, if I bought enough pairs of the sneakers,
I’d end up actually
making
money, because even though they were dearer than New
York prices, they were a lot cheaper than the London ones.

Also, the logistics of the whole business were
far,
far
more challenging than I’d expected: no airline flew in and out of the
same place on the same day. I tried airport after airport – Pisa, Bologna, Rome, Florence
– and in the end I had it narrowed down to two options: fly to Pisa, hire the
car, drive to the place, drive to Rome, ditch the car, fly home;
or
fly to Florence, hire a car, drive to the place, drive back to Florence, stay the night, fly
home on Friday.

At this stage, it was four in the morning and
I’d been on the internet for ten hours, so I decided I’d go to bed and when I woke
up I’d toss a coin between Pisa or Florence.

So off I went to sleep, and when I woke up I was
no longer insane.

EPILOGUE: I managed to buy a pair from an
Italian website. I’m still not sure about the toe …

First published in
RTÉ Guide
, November
2014.