reading

1

I’m sorry, you must think I’m very rude. We’ve hardly even been introduced and here I am telling you all about the awful things that have happened to me.

Let me just give you the briefest outline of myself and I’ll save details like, for example, my first day at school until later, if we have the time.

Let’s see, what should I tell you? Well, my name is Claire and I’m twenty-nine and, as I mentioned, I’ve just had my first child two days ago (a little girl, seven pounds, four ounces, totally beautiful) and my husband (did I mention his name is James?) told me about twenty-four hours ago that he has been having an affair for the past six months, with – and get this – not even his secretary or someone glamorous from work, but with a married woman, who lives in the flat two floors below us. I mean, how suburban can you get! And not only is he having an affair but he wants a divorce.

I’m sorry if I’m being unnecessarily flippant about this. I’m all over the place. In a moment I’ll be crying again. I’m still in shock I suppose. Her name is Denise and I know her quite well.

Not quite as well as James does obviously.

The awful thing is she always seemed to be really nice.

She’s thirty-five (don’t ask me how I know this, I just do. And at the risk of sounding very sour grapes and losing your sympathy, she does look thirty-five) and she has two children and a nice husband (quite apart from my one, that is). And apparently she’s moved out of her flat and he’s moved out of his (or ours, should I say) and they’ve both moved into a new one in a secret location.

Can you believe it?! How dramatic can you get? I know her husband is Italian but I really don’t think he’s likely to kill the pair of them. He’s a waiter, not a Mafia stooge, so what’s he going to do? Black pepper them to death? Compliment them into a coma? Run them over with the dessert trolley?

But again, I seem flippant.

I’m not.

I’m heartbroken.

And it’s all such a disaster. I don’t even know what to call my little girl. James and I had discussed some names – or, in retrospect, I had discussed them and he had pretended to listen – but we hadn’t decided on anything definite. And I seem to have lost the ability to make decisions on my own. Pathetic, I know but that’s marriage for you. Bang goes your sense of personal autonomy!

I wasn’t always like this. Once I was strong-willed and independent. But that all seems like a long, long time ago.

I’ve been with James for five years, and we’ve been married for three years. And, my God, but I love that man.

Although we had a less than auspicious start, the magic took hold of us very quickly. We both agree that we fell in love about fifteen minutes after we met and we stayed that way.

Or at least I did.

For a long time I never thought I’d meet a man who wanted to marry me.

Well, perhaps I should qualify that.

I never thought I’d meet a nice man who wanted to marry me. Plenty of lunatics, undoubtedly. But a nice man, a bit older than me, with a decent job, good-looking, funny, kind. You know – one who didn’t look at me askance when I mentioned ‘The Partridge Family’, not one who promised to take me out for a night in McDonalds just as soon as they were finished their Inter Cert (or their GCSEs, for any non-Irish people that may be reading), not one who apologised for not being able to get me a birthday present because their estranged wife had taken all their salary under a court maintenance order, not one who made me feel old-fashioned and inhibited because I got angry when he said that he’d screwed his ex-girl-friend the night after he screwed me (‘My God, you convent girls are so uptight’), not one who made me feel inadequate because I couldn’t tell the difference between Piat d’Or and Zinfandel (whatever that is!)

James didn’t treat me in any of these unpleasant ways. It seemed almost too good to be true. He liked me. He liked almost everything about me.

When we first met we were both living in London. I was a waitress (more of that later) and he was an accountant.

Of all the Tex-Mex joints in all the towns in all the world, he had to walk into mine. I wasn’t a real waitress, you understand, I had a degree in English, but I went through my rebellious stage rather later than most, at about twenty-three. Which is when I thought it might be a bit of a laugh to give up my permanent, pensionable wellish-paid job in Dublin and go off to the Godless city of London and live like an irresponsible student.

Which is something I should have done when I was an irresponsible student. But I was too busy getting work experience in my Summer holidays then, so my irresponsibility just had to wait until I was good and ready for it.

Like I always say, there’s a time and a place for spontaneity.

Anyway, I had managed to land myself a job as a waitress in this highly trendy London restaurant, all loud music and video screens and minor celebrities.

Well to be honest, there were more minor celebrities on the staff than amongst the clientele, what with most of the staff being out-of-work actors and models and the like.

How I ever got a job there at all is beyond me. Although I may have been employed as the token Wholesome Waitress. To begin with I was the only waitress under eight feet tall and over five and a half stone. And although I may not have been model-material, I suppose I had a certain, shall we say, natural kind of charm – you know – short shiny brown hair, blue eyes, freckles, big smile, that kind of thing.

And I was so unworldly and naive. I never realised when I was coming face to well-made-up face with the stars of stage and television.

More than once I’d be serving (and I use the word in its loosest possible term) some table of people (and I also use that word in its loosest possible term) when one of the other waitresses would elbow me (sending scalding barbecue sauce into the unfortunate groin of a customer) and hiss something like, ‘Isn’t that guy that you’re serving whatshisname out of that band?’

And I might reply, ‘Which guy? The one in the leather dress?’ (Remember, these were the eighties.)

‘No,’ she might hiss back, ‘the one with the blond dreadlocks and wearing the Chanel lipstick. Isn’t he that singer?’

‘Er, is he?,’ I would stammer, feeling untrendy and foolish for not knowing who this person was.

Anyway I loved working there. It thrilled me to the middle-class marrow of my bourgeois bones. It seemed so decadent and exciting to wake at one in the afternoon every day and go to work at six and finish at twelve and get drunk with the barmen and busboys afterwards.

While at home in Ireland my poor mother wept bitter tears at the thought of her daughter with the university education serving hamburgers to pop-stars.

And not even very famous pop-stars, to add insult to injury.

I had been working there about six months the night I met James. It was a Friday night, which was traditionally the night the OJs frequented our restaurant. OJ standing, of course, for Office Jerks.

At five o’clock every Friday, like graves disgorging their dead, offices all over the centre of London liberated their staff for the weekend so that hordes of pale, spotty, cheap-suited clerks descended on us, all wide-eyed and eager, looking for the stars and to get drunk, in any order you like.

It was de rigueur for us waitresses to stand around sneering disdainfully at the besuited clientele, shaking our heads in disbelieving pity at the attire, hairstyles etc., of the poor customers, to ignore them for the first fifteen minutes or so of their visit, swishing past them, earrings and bracelets jangling, obviously doing something far more important than attending to their pathetic needs and finally, after reducing them near to tears with frustration and hunger, to sashay up to the table with a huge smile, pen and pad at the ready. ‘Evening Gentlemen, can I get you a drink?’

It made them so grateful, you see. After that it didn’t make a blind bit of difference if the drinks orders were all wrong and the food never came at all, they still left a huge tip, so lucky did they feel to get our attention bestowed on them.

Our motto was ‘Not only is the customer always wrong, he is likely to be very badly dressed into the bargain’.

On the night in question, James and three of his colleagues sat in my section and I attended to their needs in my normal irresponsible and slapdash fashion. I paid them almost no attention whatsoever, barely listened to them as I took their order and certainly made no eye contact with them. If I had I might have noticed that one of them (yes, James, of course), was very handsome, in a black-haired, green-eyed, five-foottenish kind of way. I should have looked beyond the suit and seen the soul of the man.

Oh shallowness, thy name is Claire.

But I wanted to be out the back with the other waitresses, drinking beer and smoking and talking about sex. Customers were an unwelcome interference.

‘Can I have my steak very rare?’ asked one of the men.

‘Um,’ I said vaguely. I was even more uninterested than usual because I had noticed a book on the table. It was a really good book, one that I had read myself.

I loved books. And I loved reading. And I loved men who read. I loved a man who knew his existentialism from his magic-realism. And I had spent the last six months working with people who could just about manage to read Stage magazine (laboriously mouthing the words silently as they did so). I suddenly realised, with a pang, how much I missed the odd bit of intelligent conversation.

Because I could raise the stakes in any conversation on the modern American novel. I’ll see your Hunter S Thompson and I’ll raise you a Jay McInerney.

Suddenly the people at this table stopped being mere irritants and took on some sort of identity for me.

‘Who owns this book?’ I asked abruptly, interrupting the order-placing. (I don’t care how you want your steak done.)

The table of four men started. I had spoken to them! I had treated them almost as if they were human!

‘I do,’ said James and, as my blue eyes met his green eyes across his Mango Daiquiri (even though he had, in fact, ordered a pint of lager), that was it, the silvery magic dust was sprinkled on us. In that instant something wonderful happened. From the moment we really looked at each other, even though we knew almost nothing about each other (except that we liked the same books) (oh yes – and that we liked the look of each other), we both knew we had met someone special.

I maintained that we fell in love immediately.

He maintained nothing of the sort and said that I was a romantic fool.

He said it took him at least thirty seconds longer for him to fall in love with me.

Historians will argue.

First of all he had to establish that I had read the book in question also. Because he thought that I must be some kind of thick model or singer if I was working there as a waitress. You know, in the same way that I had written him off as some kind of sub-human clerk. Served me right.

‘Have you read it?’ he asked, obviously surprised, the tone of his voice actually implying ‘can you read at all?’

‘Yes, I’ve read all his books,’ I told him.

‘Is that right?’ he said thoughtfully, as he leant back in his chair, looking up at me with interest. A lock of his black silky hair had fallen across his forehead.

‘Yes,’ I managed to reply, feeling slightly nauseous with lust.

‘The car chases are good, aren’t they?’ he said.

Now, I should tell you here that there were no car chases in any of the books we were talking about. They were serious profound books about life and death and similar matters.

‘Jesus!’ I thought in alarm, ‘handsome, intelligent and funny. Am I able for this?’

And then James smiled at me, a slow, sexy smile, a knowing kind of smile, totally at odds with the pin-striped suit he was wearing, and I swear to you, my entrails turned to warm ice cream. You know, kind of hot and cold and tingly and … well … like they were dissolving, or something.

And for years afterwards, long after the initial magic had worn off and most of our conversations were about insurance policies and Lenor and dry rot, all I had to do was remember that smile and I felt as if I had just fallen in love all over again.

We exchanged some more words.

Just a few.

But they were enough to let me know that he was nice and clever and funny.

He asked for my phone number.

It was a sackable offence to give a customer my phone number.

I gave him my phone number.

When he left the restaurant that first night, with his three cronies, a blur of briefcases and umbrellas and rolled-up copies of the Financial Times and sombre-looking suits, he smiled goodbye at me, and (well, I say this with the benefit of hindsight. It’s very easy to foretell the future when it’s already happened, if you know what I mean) I knew I was looking at my destiny.

My future.

A few minutes later he was back.

‘Sorry,’ he grinned, ‘what’s your name?’

As soon as the other waitresses found out that a suit had asked for my phone number and, worse again, that I had actually given it to him, I was treated like a pariah. It was a long time before I was invited round again to their squat to snort cocaine, I can tell you.

But I didn’t care. Because I had really fallen for James.

For all my talk of independence, I was actually a very romantic person at heart. And for all my talk of rebellion, I was as middle-class as you could get.

From the first time we went out together, it was wonderful. So romantic, so beautiful.

And I’m sorry to do this to you but I’m going to have to use a lot of clichés here. I can see no other way round it.

I’m ashamed to tell you that I was walking on air. And I’m even sorrier to have to tell you that I felt like I’d known him all my life. And I’m going to compound things by telling you that I felt that no one understood me the way that he did. And as I’ve lost all credibility with you I might as well tell you that I didn’t think it was possible to be this happy. But I won’t push it by telling you that he made me feel safe, sexy, smart and sweet. (And sorry about this, but I really must tell you that I felt that I had met my missing other half and now I was whole, and I promise that I’ll leave it at that.) (Except perhaps to mention that he was a right laugh and great in bed. Now I mean it, that’s all, positively all.)

When we first started going out together I was waitressing most nights so I could only see him when I finished work. But he would wait up for me. And when I came round, exhausted, after hours of dishing up char-grilled whatever to the people of London (or the people of Pennsylvania or Hamburg, if I’m to be more accurate) he would – and I can’t believe it to this day – he would bathe my aching feet and massage them with Body Shop peppermint foot lotion. Even though it was past twelve and he had to be at work helping people to fiddle their tax returns, or whatever it is that accountants do, at eight the following morning, he still did it. Five nights a week. And he would bring me up to date on the soaps. Or go to the twenty-four hour garage for me when I ran out of cigarettes. Or he would tell me funny little stories about his day at work. I know that it’s hard to believe that any story about accountancy could be funny, but he managed it.

And it meant that we could never go out on Saturday nights. And he didn’t complain.

Weird, huh?

Yes, I thought so too.

And he would help me to count my tips. And give me great advice about what to invest them in. Government bonds and that kind of thing.

I usually bought shoes.

Shortly after this I had the good fortune to be sacked from the waitressing job (a silly misunderstanding involving me, several bottles of imported lager, a ‘dinner-in-lap’ scenario and a totally unreasonable customer who had absolutely no sense of humour. Anyway, I believe his scars faded almost completely.)

And managed to secure another position with more regular hours. So our romance proceeded on a more traditional timetable.

And after a while we moved in together. And after a bit longer we got married. And a couple of years later we decided to have a baby and my ovaries seemed to be game and his spermatozoa registered no complaint on that score and my womb had no objection so I got pregnant. And I gave birth to a baby girl.

Which is where you came in.

So I think we’re pretty much up to date here.

And if you were hoping for, or expecting some kind of awful gory depiction of childbirth, with talk of stirrups and forceps and moans of agony and vulgar comparisons with excreting a four stone sack of potatoes, then I’m sorry to disappoint you.

(Well all right then, just to humour you, take your worst period pain ever and multiply it by seven million and make it last for about twenty-four hours and then you have some idea what labour pains are like.)

Yes, it was scary and messy and humiliating and quite alarmingly painful. It was also exciting and thrilling and wonderful. But the most important thing for me was that it was over. I could kind of remember the pain, but it no longer had the power to hurt me. But when James left me I realised I’d rather go through the pain of a hundred labours than go through the pain of losing him that I felt then.

This is how he broke the news of his imminent departure to me.

After I held my baby in my arms for the first time, the nurses took her away to the baby ward and I was brought back to my ward and went to sleep for a while.

I woke up to find James standing over me, staring down at me, his eyes very green in his white face. I smiled up at him sleepily and triumphantly. ‘Hello darling,’ I grinned.

‘Hello Claire,’ he said formally and politely.

Fool that I was, I thought he was being grave and serious as some kind of mark of respect. (Behold my wife, she was delivered today of a child, she is woman, she is lifegiver – you know, that kind of thing.)

He sat down. He sat on the edge of the hard hospital chair, looking as if he was going to get up and run away any second. Which indeed he was

‘Have you been to the baby ward to see her?’ I asked him dreamily, ‘She’s so beautiful.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ he said shortly. ‘Look, Claire, I’m leaving,’ he said abruptly.

‘Why?’ I asked snuggling back into my pillows, ‘you’ve only just got here.’ (Yes, I know, I can’t believe I said that either, who writes my lines?)

‘Claire, listen to me,’ he said, getting a bit agitated. ‘I’m leaving you.’

‘What?’ I said slowly and carefully. I must admit he had my attention now.

‘Look Claire, I’m really sorry, but I’ve met someone else and I’m going to be with her and I’m sorry about the baby and everything and to leave you like this, but I must,’ he blurted out, as white as a ghost, his eyes bright with anguish.

‘What do you mean by you’ve “met” someone else?’ I asked bewildered.

‘I mean that … well … I’ve fallen in love with someone else,’ he said looking wretched.

‘What do you mean, another woman, or something?’ I asked feeling as if I’d been given a blow to the base of my skull with a cricket bat.

‘Yes,’ he said, no doubt relieved that I seemed to have grasped the basics of the situation.

‘And you’re leaving me?’ I echoed him disbelievingly.

‘Yes,’ he said, looking at his shoes, at the ceiling, at my bottle of Lucozade, at anything other than my eyes.

‘But don’t you love me anymore?’ I found myself asking.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so,’ he replied.

‘But what about the baby?’ I asked, stunned. He couldn’t possibly leave me but he especially couldn’t leave me now that we had had a baby together. ‘You’ve got to take care of the two of us.’

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure that you’re taken care of financially and we’ll sort something out about the flat and the mortgage and all that, but I have to go.’

I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. What the hell was he talking about, flats and money and mortgages and crap? According to the script we should be cooing over our baby and gently arguing about which side of the family she got her looks from. But James, my James, was talking about leaving me. Who’s in charge around here? I’d like to complain about my life. I distinctly ordered a happy life with a loving husband to go with my new-born baby and what was this shoddy travesty that I’d been served up instead?

‘Jesus, Claire,’ he said, ‘I hate to leave you like this. But if I come home with you and the baby now I won’t ever be able to leave.’

But wasn’t that the whole idea, I thought bewildered.

‘I know that there’s no good time to tell you something like this. I couldn’t tell you when you were pregnant, in case you lost the baby. So I have to tell you now.’

‘James,’ I said faintly, ‘this is all very weird.’

‘Yes, I know,’ he agreed hurriedly. ‘You’ve been through a lot in the last twenty-four hours.’

‘Why were you at the birth, if you planned to leave me the minute it was over?’ I asked him, holding his arm, trying to get him to look at me.

‘Because I promised,’ he said, shaking my hand off his arm and not meeting my eyes, looking like a chastised schoolboy.

‘Because you promised?’ I said, trying to make sense of this. ‘But you’ve promised me loads of things. Like to cherish me and to love me till death do us part.’

‘Well, I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘But I can’t keep those promises.’

‘So what’s going to happen?’ I asked numbly. I didn’t for a second accept a single word of what he was saying. But the band keeps playing even though no one is dancing. I was having what to all intents and purposes might appear to the impartial outside observer to be a conversation, with James. But it wasn’t a conversation at all because I didn’t mean anything that I said and I didn’t accept anything that he said. When I asked him what was going to happen, I didn’t need an answer. I knew what was going to happen. He was coming home with me and the baby and there would be no more of this nonsense.

I think I almost felt that if I kept him talking and with me he would realise how silly he was being to even think of leaving me.

He stood up. He stood too far away from me for me to be able to touch him. He was wearing a black suit (we had often joked in the past about him wearing it to oversee receiverships and liquidations) and he looked grim and pale. And in a way he had never looked more beautiful to me.

‘I see you’re wearing your undertaker suit,’ I said bitterly. ‘Nice touch.’

He didn’t even attempt a smile and I knew then that I had lost him. He looked like James, he sounded like James, he smelt like James, but it wasn’t James.

Like some fifties science-fiction film, where the hero’s girlfriend’s body is taken over by an alien – it still looks like her on the outside (pink angora sweater, sweet little handbag, bra so pointy it would take the eye out of a spider, etc.) – but her eyes have changed.

The casual observer might still think it was James. But I knew from looking at his eyes, my James had left. Some cold unloving stranger was in his body. I didn’t know where my James had gone.

Maybe he was in the alien spaceship with Peggy-Jo.

‘I’ve moved most of my things,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch. Take care of yourself.’

He turned on his heel and quickly left the ward. In fact, he almost broke into a run. I wanted to run after him but the bastard knew that I was bed-bound courtesy of several stitches in my vagina.

He was gone.

I lay in my hospital bed, very still for a long time. I was stunned, I was shocked, I was horrified, I was disbelieving. But in a very odd kind of way, there was something I did believe about it. There was something almost familiar about this feeling.

I know it couldn’t be a feeling of familiarity, because I had never been deserted by a husband before. But there was definitely something there. I think there’s a part of everyone’s brain, certainly mine, that keeps look-out on some rocky outcrop high in the hills, waiting for signs of danger. And it signals back to the rest of the brain when trouble is afoot. The emotional version of ‘the injuns is coming’. The more I thought about it, the more I realised this part of my brain had probably been flashing mirrors and sending up smoke signals like crazy over the past months. But the rest of my brain was with the wagon camp down in the pleasant verdant valley of pregnancy and didn’t want to know about impending danger. So it completely ignored the messages it was sent.

I’d known that James was miserable for most of the time that I was pregnant, but I had put that down to my mood-swings, my constant hunger, my raging sentimentality, where I cried at everything from Little House On the Prairie to The Money Programme.

And of course our sex life was drastically curtailed. But I had thought as soon as I had had the baby that every thing would be back to normal. Except better, if you see what I mean.

I thought that James’s misery was just as a result of my being pregnant and its attendant side-effects but, looking back, maybe I had ignored things that I shouldn’t have.

So what was I to do? I didn’t even know where he was staying. But some instinct told me to leave him alone for a while. Humour him. Pretend to go along with it.

I could hardly believe it.

Leaving me, indeed! My normal reaction to feeling hurt or betrayed was to go on the warpath, but somehow I knew that it wouldn’t do me any good at all in this situation. I had to stay calm and sane until I could decide what to do.

One of the nurses squeaked past me in her rubber-soled shoes. She stopped and smiled at me. ‘How are you now?’ she asked.

‘Oh fine,’ I said willing her to go away.

‘I suppose your husband will be in to see you and the baby later,’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ I replied bitterly.

She gave me a startled look and moved away quickly, over to one of the nice, civil, polite mothers, clicking her pen and throwing me nervous glances.

I decided to ring Judy.

Judy was my best friend. We’d been friends since we were eighteen. We had come over to London together. She had been my bridesmaid.

I couldn’t cope with this on my own. Judy would tell me what to do.

I cautiously and gingerly levered myself out of bed and, as quickly as my episiotomy would permit, I made my way to the pay-phone.

She answered the phone immediately.

‘Oh hi Claire,’ she said. ‘I was just on my way over to see you.’

‘Good,’ was all I said.

God knows, I wanted to bawl crying and tell her about James allegedly leaving me, but there was a queue of women in pink towelling dressing-gowns behind me waiting to use the phone (no doubt to ring their devoted husbands) and, against all the odds, I had some pride left.

‘Smug bitches,’ I thought sourly (and irrationally, I must admit) as I limped back to bed.

As soon as Judy came I knew that she knew about James. I knew because she said, ‘Claire, I know about James’. Also because she didn’t arrive with a huge bunch of flowers, a bigger smile and a card the size of a kitchen table with storks all over it. She looked anxious and nervous.

My heart sank to my boots. If James was telling other people, then it must be true.

‘He’s left me,’ I said dramatically.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘How could he?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘He’s fallen in love with someone else,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘How do you know?’ I asked her, pouncing on her for the information.

‘Michael told me. Aisling told him. George told her.’ (Michael was Judy’s boyfriend. Aisling worked with him. George was Aisling’s husband. George worked with James.)

‘So everyone knows,’ I said quietly.

There was a pause. Judy looked as if she would like to die.

‘Then it must be true,’ I said.

‘I think it is,’ she said, obviously embarrassed.

‘Do you know who this other woman is?’ I asked her, feeling lousy about putting her in such an awkward position, but I had to know, and I was too shocked to ask James before he left.

‘Er, yes,’ she said, even more embarrassed. ‘It’s that Denise.’

It took me a minute to realise who she was talking about.

‘WHAT!’ I shrieked. ‘Not nice Denise from downstairs?’

A miserable nod from Judy.

It was just as well that I was already lying down. ‘That bitch!’ I exclaimed.

‘And there’s more,’ she mumbled. ‘He’s talking about marrying her.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’ I shouted. ‘He’s already married. To me. I hadn’t heard that they had made polygamy legal in the last day or so.’

‘They haven’t,’ she said.

‘But then …’ I trailed off bewildered.

‘Claire,’ she sighed despondently. ‘He says he’s going to divorce you.’

As I said, it was just as well I was already lying down.

The afternoon ebbed away, along with Judy’s patience and any hope that I might still harbour.

I looked at her in despair.

‘Judy, what am I going to do?’

‘Look,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘in two days you’ll be getting out of here. You still have somewhere to live, you have enough money to feed yourself and the baby, you’ll be going back to work in six months, you’ve got a new-born child to look after and give James some time and eventually the two of you will sort something out.’

‘But Judy,’ I wailed. ‘He wants a divorce.’

Although James seemed to have forgotten one big fact. There is no divorce in Ireland. James and I were married in Ireland. Our marriage was blessed by the Fathers of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. Although a fat lot of good it had obviously done us. So long, Succour.

I was at a total loss. I felt alone and afraid. I wanted to pull the blankets over my head and die. But I couldn’t because I had a poor defenceless child to look after.

What a start in life she was getting. Less than two days old and already she’d been deserted by her father and her mother was on the verge of cracking up.

For the millionth time I wondered how James could do this to me.

‘How could James do this to me?’ I asked Judy.

‘You’ve asked me that about a million times,’ she said.

So I had.

I didn’t know how James could do this to me. I just knew that he had.

Up to now I suppose that I’d thought that life doled out the unpleasant things to me in evenly-spaced bite-sized pieces. That it never gave me more than I could cope with at one time.

When I used to hear about people who had cumulative disasters, like having a car-crash, losing a job and catching their boyfriend in bed with their sister all in the one week, I used to kind of think it was their fault. Well, not exactly their fault. But if people behaved like victims that they would become victims, if people expected the worst to happen then it invariably did.

I could see now how wrong I was. Sometimes people don’t volunteer to be victims and they become victims anyway. It’s not their fault. It certainly wasn’t my fault that my husband thought that he’d fallen in love with someone else. I didn’t expect it to happen and I certainly didn’t want it to happen. But it had happened.

I knew then that life was no respecter of circumstance. The force that flings disasters at us doesn’t say ‘Well, I won’t give her that lump in her breast for another year. Best to let her recover from the death of her mother first’. It just goes right on ahead and does whatever it feels like, whenever it feels like it.

I realised no one is immune from the cumulative disaster syndrome. Not that I thought that having a baby was a disaster. But it could certainly come under the heading of upheaval.

I’d thought I was so in control of my life and if, God forbid, anything ever did go wrong with myself and James that I would be able to devote my full time and energy to fixing it. I didn’t quite expect to be dumped within twenty-four hours of giving birth to my first child, when my energy levels were at an all-time low and my vulnerability levels at an all-time high.

Not to mention being as fat as the fool that I so obviously was.

Fat arse never won fair James.

Judy and I sat on the bed in silence, both trying to think of something constructive to say. Suddenly I had the answer. Well, maybe not the answer, but an answer. Something to be getting on with for the time being.

‘I know what I’ll do,’ I said to Judy.

‘Oh thank God,’ I could feel her thinking fervently. ‘Thank God.’

And like Scarlett O’Hara in the last few lines of Gone With The Wind, I said plaintively, ‘I’ll go home. I’ll go home to Dublin.’

Yes, I agree with you. ‘Dublin’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as ‘Tara’, but what would be the point in me going home to Tara. I knew no one there. In fact I had only ever passed through it about twice on my way to Drogheda.

Marian Keyes

WATERMELON

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

THE BEGINNING

PENGUIN

WATERMELON

Prologue

1