At a Time Like This (7 page)

She told me once about the research she had done, once her hair grew back wild and curly and a deeper shade of red, after her mother abandoned her. That was always Claire’s word:
abandoned. Her mother had not ‘left’ or ‘run off or even simply ‘disappeared’ – she had always ‘abandoned’ her husband and children and I think that
Paul was the only one able to stop that hurting.

‘Red hair and pale skin are a kind of protection,’ she told me on that occasion. ‘It was an advantage to women, thousands and thousands of years ago. It meant that our skin
made vitamin D from sunlight, so that we didn’t get rickets.’

I must have looked at her blankly. I didn’t get the point of what she was trying to tell me.

‘Rickets caused pelvic deformations,’ she said, clearly warming to her theme. I suspected Paul’s medical knowledge was behind this enthusiasm. ‘It caused women to die in
childbirth. So,’ she grinned, ‘my ancestors had an advantage and that’s how I get to be here. Paul says it means we’ll have lots and lots of babies.’

I didn’t point out to her back then that I was there, too, without the crowning glory of red hair. Nor did I comment on her obvious desire for ‘lots and lots of babies’ –
that was something else we didn’t have in common.

‘And the last bit of the jigsaw,’ she said, and this is something that
did
strike me even at the time as being significant, although I didn’t know why, couldn’t
have explained its resonance, ‘red-haired women can endure more pain than anyone else, even more than red-haired men. What do you think of that?’

Poor Claire. Maybe that’s why in more recent times she’s always chosen such unsuitable partners: because she can stand the pain. Or perhaps it’s why the unsuitable ones have
been drawn to her. Do your worst, her cells seem to say. I can take it.

It’s strange, though. Claire has always had the sort of physical charm that women envy but that men seem to find intimidating. When we were young, I used to think that when boys looked at
Claire, they had to have thought that nobody so lovely could possibly be available. Surely she’d already been swept off her feet: claimed by some
man,
while they were mere boys. Except
for Paul, of course. He was brave enough to capture her. When all that ended, though, Claire seemed to go to ground. She stayed resolutely single, using her looks as a shield to repel all those who
would dare to approach her. Meanwhile, the more ordinary-looking among us got dates, invitations, letters from love-struck youths.

Over the years, our little group has doled out too many evenings of comfort to Claire: too many to be good for her, I mean. Nevertheless, she’s not blameless either. None of us is. How can
we be? As my mother used to say, ‘It takes two to tango.’ And that was the sum total of her wisdom regarding the war between the sexes. I was to interpret it as best I saw fit. And I
have done so, finding it as satisfying a way as any of accepting, and allocating, responsibility for the things I do and for the things done to me. And Claire was definitely responsible for the
tension and bad feeling that fractured our group friendship, almost beyond repair, some ten or eleven years ago. But that’s a whole other story.

I close the shutters in my bedroom now, but leave the windows open. That way, the night air can filter through to me, but the possibilities of bug infestations are reduced. Never one to take
chances, I plug in my mosquito repellent, always mindful of my first joyful, heedless visit here about four years ago. Back then, I had thrown open the shutters of my rented villa in an exultation
of welcome, dizzy on champagne and stars and velvety darkness. The following morning saw me in the local pharmacy, my arms bitten and swollen, my face unrecognizable. I had thrown back the sheet
during the night, too, apparently leaving just my feet and shins covered. I will simply not go there on the ferocity and the number of bites that had left me, as the grave signorina with her white
coat and antiseptic air told me, ‘
completamente avvelenatd.
Completely toxic. I remember thinking that there were probably quite a few people who would agree with that
characterization, but I wasn’t up to even a weak stab at humour.

I take off my makeup, tone and moisturize my face, brush my teeth with my new electric toothbrush. I undress in the huge bathroom, the tub already filled with warm, scented water, and I light
the candles that I dotted around everywhere on my last visit. Just before I step in, my new mobile beeps. I scroll down through the text message and smile, surprised at the potency of longdistance
love.

I know that a full bath is an irresponsible luxury in a land that is short of water. But who cares? I shall allow myself this, as often as I like, until he arrives. Tomorrow, the brisk regime of
early walks and purposeful activity will begin.

For now, though, all I want is to float, quietly, on the small ocean of possibility that my life is about to become.

Tomorrow will bring what it will.

3.
Maggie

Georgie and Claire and I used to call her Helly, back then: short for Helicopter. I’m talking about Nora, of course. She’d always had this amazing instinct for
where and when the rest of us might be meeting. And she’d just turn up. One day, she was hovering at the margins of our little group and the next, there she was, installed at the centre of
things. Although, to be fair, her presence among us was partly due to me, too.

Helly-Nora was three years older than the rest of us. At our age now, that kind of a gap means nothing. But back when we were eighteen, it was like an entire generation. When I met her first, I
thought she was mature and a bit more serious than we were, and I liked that. I thought of her as a welcome change from the noisy fun and silliness of number 12, Rathmines Road.

Helly and I – sorry, Nora and I – ended up in the same French conversation class during our first term. We were thrown together by both of us arriving late. I’d been standing
outside debating whether to go in at all. I was still nervous of the academics, and I felt a complete fool that I’d mixed up the venue. Nora was even more flustered than I was.

‘Is this Mademoiselle Ondart’s seminar?’ She looked hot and damp, her forehead was wrinkled and perspiration was gathering in little beads across her upper lip. I remember
noticing the faint shadow of a moustache and wondering why on earth she didn’t bleach it.

‘Yeah,’ I said, and stubbed out my cigarette. ‘But she’s already started and I don’t want to barge in. It’s kinda rude, isn’t it?’

Her anxiety moved up a step. I could see it in her face. ‘Oh, but we can’t
not go
in. Not when it’s a conversation class. Because afterwards there’s no way to
catch up on what we’ve missed.’

I hadn’t thought about that. Or if I had, I didn’t care. I was never the most conscientious of students. I made sure I did just enough to get by. I liked Spanish and French well
enough, but fashion was my passion back then. It still is. Not everything has changed. And music, of course. Those were the places where I really lived my life. The rest was just so much
window-dressing as far as I was concerned. I got a real buzz out of making my own clothes and I even used to cut my own patterns. I loved the whole ritual of the tailor’s chalk, the tissue
paper, the clackety-clack of the Singer sewing machine, and all the while there’d be music belting away in the background.

Tamla Motown, now that was my kind of stuff. Stevie Wonder, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Otis Redding. Jimmy Ruffin crying over broken hearts, Diana Ross yearning after lost love, Marvin
Gaye and Tammi Terrell singing their hearts out about high mountains and low valleys and rivers that weren’t wide enough. About there being nothing like true love, baby – hours and
hours of doom and betrayal and misery. My brother Paul never stopped teasing me about my taste in music. But I’ve often asked myself, over the years, if something inside me
knew.
I
mean, if there was some instinct already there, at work, making sure that I was prepared for the life that ended up being mine. I like that kind of speculation, particularly at a time like this,
when it doesn’t matter any more.

My college years were not where I shone the brightest. I managed only a pass degree, and my parents were a bit sniffy about that, but it didn’t bother me. On the day I met Nora, I
couldn’t have cared less about Mademoiselle Ondart and her corner on disapproval. You know the type. Tiny and neat and full of Parisian superiorities. But it was obvious that Nora felt
differently. I would have been just as happy to go and have a fag and a coffee in the Buttery, but she was already walking towards the door of the seminar room. She was determined to have what she
felt she was entitled to.

‘Let’s go in together,’ she urged. ‘I’ll apologize for both of us. Okay?’

‘Okay’ Whatever. I followed her inside and we took the first available chairs. Unfortunately, they were the ones closest to Mademoiselle herself, so we had to walk the whole length
of the room under her irritated gaze. She was just getting into her stride, with her photocopies from
Le Monde.
She waved at us, her ringed and braceleted hand saying: ‘Just get on
with it, girls.’

Nora’s spoken French wasn’t bad and she told me after the seminar that she’d gone to France for a couple of months once she finished her Leaving Cert. Then she’d gone on
to work in London. Both of these things seemed exotic to me at the time. I’d never lived anywhere else but Killiney

‘So, where did you work when you lived in London?’ I was curious. Georgie and I were already thinking about the summer, doing a little bit of planning ahead. The idea of a few months
in a big city like London appealed to us. That was assuming I passed my exams and didn’t have to come home early to repeat. But I knew that failure wasn’t an option. Not for me,
particularly after the nuclear holocaust that had followed Paul’s Pre-Med exams. Although my parents had made no secret of the fact that they were happy to have got both of us, Paul and me,
to the stage where they no longer had any responsibility for us, they still insisted on academic success. You might say that they held the door open for us as soon as they decently could, but we
went through it on their terms.

I don’t think that Paul ever wanted to be a doctor, but it was one way of getting our parents’ attention. I mean, he
really
needed them to notice him. And when he failed
Pre-Med, he had more of their attention than he knew what to do with. Don’t they say that for some people, negative attention is better than none at all? That’s how Paul was back then,
I’m convinced of it. As for me, I voted with my feet as soon as I was able. For as long as I can remember, I’d always wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere at all, as long as it was
away from my parents, particularly my mother. I got very tired of always feeling in the way.

I was a serious disappointment to the old pair, I know that. I was a bit of a wild teenager, I did my fair share of illegal substances, developed a Dublin accent, all the better to piss them
off, and I hung around for a while with the sort of people that they didn’t like. I kept Georgie from them, too, as much as I could. They knew of her existence, all right; they approved of
her and her family, and that was another reason for keeping them apart. Georgie was still living in Killiney back then. It was before her father’s transformation from ‘builder’
into ‘developer’ and her family’s move to Ballsbridge when she and I were both barely fifteen. She changed schools then and I missed her.

From the time Georgie left the neighbourhood, I deliberately lived a ‘fuck you’ lifestyle. It was one way of putting distance between me and my parents, their gin and tonics, their
bridge club, their almighty golf. Looking back, I was probably a bit inconsistent – not to mention a complete nightmare by the time I reached eighteen. I was happy enough to have them pay my
fees for Trinity and give me my monthly allowance, though. I figured, well, they have it. So I might as well spend it.

Anyway, I can remember that first conversation I had with Nora as though it was yesterday. I remember how I waited, dying to hear her reply and expecting to get loads of information about
London. I wanted to hear about fashion, about places to see, things to do. But she just leafed through her notebook, as if she was looking for the right answer among all her neatly written tables
of vocabulary and handy phrases.

‘Oh, I just worked in an office,’ she said. ‘I did some temping. It wasn’t terribly exciting, really’

Now that was far too vague for me. ‘But London – what about London?’ I persisted. ‘Is it a great city to live in?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘If you like big cities. I don’t, not really’

And that was the end of that. I got nothing else out of her, either, the next time I tried, so I got the message and gave up. It didn’t take long for me to find out that what had seemed
like Nora’s grown-upness was, in fact, a sort of detached wariness that made her expect the worst from everyone. I don’t know why, but I was drawn to her vulnerability. She seemed more
honest, more connected to reality than the rest of us. She spoke her mind, sometimes without thinking. There was something childlike about her, and she was kind. In those early days, she was also
lonely and latched on to me, and by extension to Georgie and Claire. We didn’t mind, Claire and I, most of the time, but Georgie resented her from the word go.

And that’s how Helly the Helicopter was born. Georgie christened her, said that Nora hovered about the three of us and made the space around us thrum. It was, she said, as though Nora
sucked the oxygen from the air and the strength from our limbs. Eventually, the rest of us would give up, gasping, ashamed of ourselves, and invite her to wherever it was we happened to be going.
There was an element of truth in all that Georgie said. But still. Nora needed us and neither Claire nor I had any intention of turning her away. Georgie had her own way in far too many other
things for us to give in on that.

She – Georgie – and I had a falling out over Nora once. It was the first serious row we’d ever had, and we’ve been glued together ever since we were four. We had our
whole lives mapped out when we were fourteen. Share a flat, make the most of college, of freedom. Have wild parties and wilder boyfriends and maybe, eventually, each settle down somewhere close to
the other.