Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (12 page)

Anyroadup, Jules starts dum-dum-dumming the theme music from
The Omen
under her breath as Lisa slithers into the kitchen, full of abject apologies for disturbing me in the middle of cooking dinner, but nevertheless, still big fat doing it anyway. Vintage Lisa; at all times, just barge right on ahead and completely suit yourself regardless.

I grudgingly have to admit that she’s attractive, naturally tall and skinny, the jammy cow, but most of the time she streels round the place looking care-worn, thin, pale and permanently unsmiling. Red hair, but with her natural dark roots showing; yet another source of incessant griping from her. That she can’t afford to go to the hairdressers any more and has to make do with home colours instead, all while her husband Charlie still somehow has money to go down to the pub, night in and night out. And I’m sorry if this sounds a bit unsympathetic but bear in mind that when it comes to whinging, this is a woman who’d give Gillian McKeith a right run for her money.

We exchange Merry Christmas air kisses as Jules scarpers back to the safety of the TV.

‘You see Charlie bloody well buggered off to have drinks with some boozing buddy in Lismore this morning,’ Lisa moans, making it sound like he did this with the sole intention of getting at her, ‘leaving me all on my own with the kids. And of course my sister in Dublin is having my parents over to her this year and never even bothered to invite us, can you believe it? Which means I have to cook a dinner myself. And I haven’t even started it yet so my turkey probably won’t be done for about another seventeen hours. Anyway, I thought I might as well pop in and wish you all a happy Christmas. Everything looks lovely, Annie,’ she sighs enviously. ‘I wish I had enough money to go all out, like you always do.’

I usher her into the drawing room to say hello to Audrey and then offer her a drink. She notices Jules drinking champagne and asks for the same.

Immediate burning sensation, exactly like heartburn. She’s drinking. This means that not only will she end up leaving her car here and have to come back to collect it during my precious time out with Dan, but worse, far worse…Jaysus knows when she intends to leave. Not being inhospitable or anything, but if the measure of a good guest is someone who knows when to go, then the Countess Dracula is most definitely NOT one of them. It wouldn’t be uncommon for her to pop in for a coffee in the afternoon and still be here with her kids asleep upstairs in one of the spare rooms well past midnight. With absolutely no intention of going home either, even at that hour.

‘So what did Santa Claus bring this morning?’ Dan asks little Sue, who’s plonked herself on the sofa beside Audrey, pulling a doll along by its hair. Dan, by the way, is normally
great with children and for their part, kids of all ages love him…with the sole exception of this little madam.

‘That,’ she says disgustedly. ‘I didn’t want a stupid doll. I hate dolls. I wanted a bike.’

‘Couldn’t afford it,’ says Lisa focusing solely on Dan and only Dan, completely indifferent to the fact that the child isn’t deaf and can clearly hear her. ‘Although her father still manages to have enough money to keep up his sixty fags a day habit, doesn’t he?’

No one says anything to that. Then Harry starts noisily kicking his soccer ball around the drawing room, and Audrey presses her hands to the onion-thin skin on her temples, in a gesture I know the meaning of all too well. Meanwhile Lisa flops down on the sofa, telling the room about how exhausted she is and how no one ever appreciates the sheer amount of work she does at this time of year, to much behind-her-back-eye-rolling from Jules. I excuse myself and get back to the kitchen to start getting the vegetables on.

A sharp stab of worry; what do I do if Lisa invites herself and her kids to stay for dinner? But I let it go. Her husband, Charlie, is presumably only out visiting for the morning and will be back later, so she won’t have any choice but to leave. Because surely not even the Countess Dracula would gatecrash our Christmas dinner? Would she?

The phone rings out in the hallway, but I let Dan get it. I check the clock on the kitchen wall, not yet midday. Only seven am in Washington where my mother is, way too early for her to call yet. Next thing, just as I’m up to my elbows in Brussels sprouts, Dan strides into the kitchen, kicking off his shoes and pulling on the pair of Wellingtons he’d left by the side door last night.

Very bad sign.

Burning feeling like indigestion returns with a vengeance.

‘You going out to play soccer with Harry?’ I look up and ask him deliberately, already dreading the answer.

Because he couldn’t, could he? Take a work call? Not today of all days, not after he specifically promised he wouldn’t.

‘Ehh…no, not exactly.’

A cold fear clutches at me and suddenly the air between us starts to throb.

No more information forthcoming. Which is what Dan does whenever he senses that I’ll be annoyed about something. Proffers absolutely nothing and leaves it to me to ask all the questions.

Bad burning feeling suddenly gets about a hundred times worse.

‘Because dinner will be ready pretty soon, you know,’ I say and somehow my tone of voice manages to make even that innocuous sentence sound like a vague threat.

‘Annie, look, I know this is inconvenient, but that was Mike Nolan on the phone…’

I swear to God, at this my knees actually loosen, like they might buckle from under me at any second. Mike Nolan is a regular client here and lives on a massive farm a good two-hour drive away. He’s also a well-known worrier, famous for calling anyone at the practice out for very little reason whatsoever.

‘…and he’s very anxious about some of his cattle.’

‘Dan, for the love of God, please tell me you’re not heading out to do a farm call. Not right now, not today of all days.’

‘You see, he thinks it might be ringworm and God love the guy, he’s in a blind panic.’

Dan doesn’t even make eye contact with me at this, like he knows I’ll flip and is just doing his best to get out of here before all hell breaks loose.

‘He thinks it might be
ringworm
!’ Now I’m raising my voice, something I don’t think I’ve ever done in this house. I know they can all hear me in the drawing room and I don’t care.

‘But ringworm isn’t even remotely serious!’ I splutter at him, absolutely stunned that he’s even considering heading all the way out to Mike Nolan’s. ‘There’s no possible way that this can be classified as an emergency! For God’s sake, it’s Christmas Day and I’m about to serve dinner. Surely, this can wait till tomorrow? Or, if you really feel you have to go, can’t you at least hold off till after we’ve eaten?’

‘Mike’s a good customer and he practically begged me to drive over there just to take a quick look. That’s all.’

‘That’s
all?
It’s at least a two-hour drive there and back! Plus the last time he hauled you out there, you didn’t get back till the following day!’

‘Look, I’ve told him I’d go – I gave him my word and I can’t go back on it. He needs my help and it would be wrong to let him down.’

‘You gave me your word this morning that there’d be no call-outs today!’

But his feet are well and truly dug in now and I know of old that whenever that happens, I’m on a loser.

‘Can I ask you one simple question, Dan? Does all the trouble I’ve gone to mean absolutely nothing to you? Only this morning you told me we’d have the whole day to ourselves. You promised.’

A low card I know, but feck it anyway. His promises are
clearly worth about as much as the Zimbabwean dollar and I want him to know it.

‘Annie, please, can you please stop making me feel worse than I already do about this? I’ll do my best to be back as soon as possible. But…it might be a while. I won’t really know till I get out there.’

A slash of sudden pain shoots through me and suddenly…that’s it. Break point. The straw has finally broken the camel’s back. A rumble of fury starts to bubble up from deep within me. In my liver it gathers bile and becomes toxic, in my stomach it gathers acid and in my blood…heat.

No room in my hot little heart now for anything but the furies of hell.

‘Dan,’ I say, trembling, with days, weeks, months and years of suppressed anger finally breaking through the surface. ‘I. Have. Had. Enough. I can’t live like this and I won’t. Do you even know the trouble I’ve taken to have everything perfect for this dinner? If you take this call you know right well that you won’t be back till God knows when…’

He looks at me, genuinely puzzled and a bit irritated that now, on top of everything else, he has to deal with a domestic scene.

‘Why are you behaving like this, Annie? I know you’re angry but like I say, it’s a once-off emergency…’

‘It is NOT a bloody emergency. If it was, I wouldn’t mind. If it was a calving or a foaling and if an animal might die, then I mightn’t appreciate the timing, but I’d still let you take the call. But it isn’t. This is just Mike Nolan selfishly taking advantage of you because he knows right well that you’re the only vet within a hundred mile radius who’d
even think of abandoning their family on Christmas Day…you’re the only one who’s soft enough…you’re the only one whose wife clearly means nothing to you…’

Oh God, right now, more than anything, I need to be articulate. I want to remind him…yet again…that with a possible year apart hanging over us, how much this pathetically short little break means to me.

But the rage that was in me a moment ago has now subsided and turned to a hard tough little lump deep in my gut. Then it travels up to my throat where it quickly turns to tears. Bucketloads of them. Messy, uncontrollable weeping that I never allow myself. Instead of an inner core of steel to draw on, I only have access to vowels and tears and snot.

And it’s not pretty.

‘Annie, come on, love, you’re blowing this completely out of proportion. You know I’ve got to take the call,’ he says, seeing the state I’m in and instinctively moving into hug me. But I’m in no mood for yet more of his everlasting apologies and roughly shove him away.

‘Right then,’ he says, stepping back and looking wounded. ‘In that case, I’ll see you when I see you.’

And that’s all folks. His final, parting shot before he’s out the door and gone.

It takes a long, long time for me to collect my thoughts and for coolness to come over me, but eventually I somehow manage to compose myself and head back into the drawing room. As evenly as I can, I tell the others that Dan won’t be joining us for dinner after all, and their reactions still say it all.

Even Audrey, Dan’s champion and number one fan, looks back at me with her pale fishy eyes, a polite, frozen smile
camouflaging the shock beneath, when she realises that it’s not an emergency call-out at all and that he mightn’t be back for hours.

If at all, this evening.

Jules is the only one who asks me if I’m OK. I can’t answer, so I just shrug. But you can always rely on the Countess Dracula to get her oar in.

‘Well, you know if you’ve got extra food going abegging, Annie, we’d love to stay and have a bite to eat with you. The kids are starving and the smell of food from the kitchen is starting to drive them mad. Don’t worry a bit about setting the extra places, I’ll take care of that for you.’

In my dull-witted state and before I even have time to register what she’s saying, as usual, she’s gone and steam-rolled right over me. A second later, she’s thrown open the drawing room door and shouted at the children who are running riot up and down the stairs, ‘So who’s hungry? Who’d like to stay and have dinner here at Auntie Annie’s?’

And I swear to God, the meal lasts longer than your average Wimbledon men’s singles final. Between Lisa’s moans about how Charlie would stagger home half-pissed later on and still expect there to be dinner for him and Audrey’s veiled whimpers every time the kids start screaming at each other, which is like a constant background noise…I’m not certain how much more I can take.

Audrey by the way, who normally has the appetite of a hump-back whale, only picks at her dinner, mainly because the kids are making such a God-awful racket involving a fork, a fistful of carrots and the last of the Brussels sprouts. Eventually she just shoves a half-eaten plate away from her, pleading a headache and warning us all that she feels one of her ‘little turns’ coming on.

Even Jules, my dependable ally, lets me down too. Normally, the girl is so laid-back, you could dot deck chairs around her and sail her through the Caribbean, but not today. She has a tendency to regress a bit when Audrey is around and throughout the whole miserable meal, what little energy she has is taken up with being irritated by her mother. She just sits there, chin cupped in her hand, occasionally mouthing at me whenever she catches my eye, ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here.’

And so the white hot tension round the table is broken only by Lisa harping on…I’m not joking, for a full
hour
…about how her wealthy sister is heading off skiing for New Year with her family, while she’s stuck at home with absolutely nothing to brighten up her entire Christmas holiday.

Meanwhile I just stare ahead, picking at dinner and only answering direct questions on automatic pilot, as she bleats on and on and on. Then ages later, I notice that Jules has finally started to wake up a bit and now looks like she’s only one vodka shot away from sniping across the table at Lisa, ‘Well, how about the obvious remedy? If money is such an issue for you, then go out and get a job locally, like Annie does and shut up your bloody whinging!’

And of course, Lisa won’t leave. Not when Audrey heads home to her TV movies and Jules scarpers off to her pal’s drink party. Not even when I pointedly tell her that I’m expecting a call from my mother in the States and that I’ll probably be on the phone for ages. Fine, she tells me. I’ll just sit by the fire with the kids and watch
Toy Story
on telly.

Worse, when Charlie calls her to see where she is, she just invites him over without even asking me if it’s OK.
Then, to add insult to injury, she throws in, ‘And I’m sure you won’t mind if he has some of the Christmas dinner, will you, Annie? It’s such a shame to let all those leftovers go to waste and it would save me all the bother of having to cook when I get home.’