Best of Friends (71 page)

She wondered what lie had been told to get Barry there, although he looked happy enough, sinking a pint of beer. There was no sign of Myles, though. Lizzie hoped it was just that he was hiding until the opportune moment. He was.

“Lizzie! Debra!” Myles hopped out from behind a pillar, threw his arms round his daughter and started to lead her towards the big table where Barry sat.

“This is a set-up,” Debra said furiously, glaring at her husband.

But still, she sat down directly opposite Barry, shooting him another fierce glare as she did so.

“Was this your idea?” she demanded.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” retorted Barry sharply. “I told you the last time we spoke that I wasn’t going to apologise because I hadn’t done anything wrong, understand?”

“What do you mean, you haven’t done anything wrong? The whole thing’s your fault,” screeched Debra, so loudly that all the other diners looked up.

Small children screaming at the top of their voices were quite common in this restaurant but grown-ups doing the same thing were a little more unusual. Real-life cabaret was always fun, and the other diners began to pay attention to the Shanahan table.

“So that’s the way you’re going to play it, is it?” demanded Barry, as oblivious as Debra to the interested gaze of the onlookers. “Little Miss Never-Does-Anything-Wrong.”

Lizzie had been wondering if there was any point in her sitting down or not, but now she sank down wearily beside Flossie and the two women looked at each other in sympathy. This was not going according to plan.

Myles looked across at her impotently and she felt a wave of anger. This had been his idea in the first place and, now they were all here, he wasn’t doing anything to stop Barry and Debra fighting.

It was Barry’s father who intervened. “Now look here, you pair,” Stan said firmly, in the tones of someone who was used to being obeyed. “We’ve all made an effort to get you both here because we think you were made for each other. We don’t want to see your marriage going down the tubes. You’ve only been married six weeks. You’ve got to understand that marriage isn’t about splitting up every time the going gets tough. If that was the case, none of us would stay together!”

Flossie shot an embarrassed look at Lizzie, as though to apologise that her husband had forgotten that Lizzie and Myles were divorced. But Stan was going full speed ahead now and tact was a forgotten country.

“Marriage is a journey,” Stan said. “It’s a voyage, like a big liner going off onto the ocean …”

“Like the
Titanic,
” suggested Barry wryly.

“Not like the
Titanic,
” said Stan. “Every time you hit a bit of trouble, you can’t bale out.”

“I bet you told them it was all my fault,” Debra said furiously to Barry, interrupting Stan.

“No, but I told them you were a spoilt bitch,” Barry said. “And you are. I don’t know why I bothered turning up at the altar at all that day—if Dad hadn’t forced me to, told me it would kill my mother if I let you down, I wouldn’t have showed up at the church at all.”

There was a silence, then: a silence so intense that even the people at the tables around them sat still, listening. Though there were times when Lizzie wanted to slap Debra and make her realise what she was throwing away, she felt hugely sorry for her daughter at that moment. Debra’s mouth was an oval of shock as she stared at Barry, disbelieving.

“What?” she breathed.

Lizzie tried to pull her away. “Come on, Debra, it’s time we went. There’s no point having a full-scale argument here. You and Barry have to sort this out in private. This was a mistake …”

But Debra would not be moved. She stood her ground and stared at Barry. “You didn’t want to marry me?” she said.

“What do you think?” Barry snapped back. “It’s a pity I listened to Dad and went ahead with it. Think of the money we’d have saved.”

As the colour drained out of Debra’s face, Lizzie made another attempt to pull her daughter away. “Come on, Debra …”

“I knew we shouldn’t get married,” Barry snapped. “You were just pushing and pushing all the time to do it because it was the next step after we’d been together so long. The ultimate commitment, you said it was. You don’t know what commitment is all about, Debra Shanahan. You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever met. It’s all ‘me, me, me’ with you. Nothing I ever did was good enough for you, was it?”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” said Debra in a pained whisper.

“I couldn’t do anything right on the honeymoon, I couldn’t do anything right when we got home, so what was the point of staying together?” said Barry bitterly. “You didn’t want me, Debra. You simply wanted a husband, any husband, and I was the poor sap who was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. The worm has turned, Debra. You spent years making me feel as if I wasn’t good enough for you, as though I’d been so lucky to get you. Now I know I’m too good for you!”

Lizzie would have gone through her own divorce ten times if she could have just taken the pain out of Debra’s eyes. “Come on, Debra,” she shouted, desperate to get her daughter to go.

This time, Debra allowed herself to be pulled away. Lizzie led her stumbling out of the restaurant. They stood outside, Lizzie with her arms round her daughter. Debra was clearly in a state of shock. At first Lizzie couldn’t work out what the girl was saying.

“Why?” moaned Debra. “Why did he say those things? I love him, I didn’t mean to hurt him. It’s just I never wanted him to take me for granted, like Dad did with you. If we’d started off that way, we’d have been stuck like that for ever and then, twenty years down the road, I’d have been dumped, like Dad dumped you. And I didn’t want that.”

She was silent all the way home in the car, and that was almost worse. If she’d been raging against Barry, calling him every name under the sun, then Lizzie would have known that Debra was going to get better. But the anguish and misery on Debra’s face told its own story.

Lizzie knew how she felt. Debra thought she’d been loved and that love had given her power—the power to leave Barry, knowing that he’d want her back and would eventually give in to all her demands. She was the powerful one in the relationship. Suddenly, all that had changed. Barry had admitted that he hadn’t wanted to marry Debra and now she had to face the truth—that he didn’t love her enough, that he could do without her. The fairy-tale marriage was over and Lizzie felt guilty that her and Myles’s dysfunctional marriage had obviously contributed to its demise.

At home, the phone was ringing but Lizzie didn’t pick it up. She knew it was probably Myles, Stan or Flossie, all trying to find out how Debra was. Nobody could have missed the look of shocked horror on her face; nobody could have been in doubt as to what Barry really meant when he said all those things. It was over.

“I’m sorry, Mum, I think I’ll go upstairs to bed,” Debra said in a low voice, as if it was perfectly normal to go to bed at lunchtime on a Sunday.

“Do you want me to bring you up some tea or anything?” Lizzie asked worriedly, wishing she could offer more comfort than mere tea.

But Debra shook her head. “I’m better off on my own, thanks.”

Lizzie thought she might ring Joe to fill him in on what had happened. It seemed now as if Joe was the only one of the Shanahans with any sense at all. He’d seen that Debra and Barry were totally unsuited to each other. Lizzie, Myles and Debra herself had been the idiots who’d thought that it could all work out. And we should have known, Lizzie told herself angrily.

Of all people, she should have realised that this marriage wasn’t going to work. She should have learned the lesson from her own marriage, she thought miserably. What was that awful thing Debra had said just now? That she hadn’t wanted Barry to take her for granted the way Myles had taken Lizzie for granted. What a legacy to give her daughter, Lizzie thought sadly.

The cute fridge magnets said you should give your children two things: roots and wings. She’d added her own offering: a screwed-up sense of what marriage was all about. Well done, Lizzie.

She picked up the phone and dialled. One of the many nice things about Joe was he never said “I told you so.”

thirty-three

S
eptember arrived in a haze of sunshine and it didn’t make going back to school any easier for Jess Barton. It had rained solidly for the last week of the holidays and now, now that she had to drag on her uniform and schlep back to school to wait for her Junior Cert exam results, the sun was shining at Greek-island-in-August level.

Jess could have just about coped with her life, including the fact that her mother was permanently miserable—Dad obviously hadn’t made an effort to speak to Mum after Jess’s pep talk—if it hadn’t been for her mother’s bombshell about the new chat show. It wasn’t that Jess hadn’t known the chat show job was on the cards. The problem was that Mum was now seriously discussing moving from Dunmore to Dublin to fit in with it.

“We have to leave Lyonnais anyhow,” Jess overheard her saying on the phone one night. “I think a fresh start in a new city might be the way forward. With my share of the money we get for this place, Jess and I could have a lovely place in Dublin, maybe an apartment because I’m fed up with gardening.”

Jess could barely believe what she was hearing. She didn’t know who her mother was talking to but this person was being given more information about Jess’s future than Jess was.

“Yeah, Mike, I don’t mind holding on while you negotiate the best deal—I’m not in any rush to sign the contract,” her mother went on. “I still don’t know if it’s the right thing to do or not. Jess might hate to leave Cork, you never know. She’s under a lot of stress right now because the exam results are out soon and I know she’s focusing on that.”

From her earwigging position at the top of the stairs, Jess felt furious. How did her mother know if she’d like to leave Cork or not if she didn’t ask her?

“OK,” finished her mother. “I could come up next week to meet them and perhaps have a look at some apartments to get a feel for what we could afford. Near good schools, definitely. No, I don’t want to mention it to anyone, not until we’ve made a definite decision to do the show.”

Jess waited for her mother to inform her of any of the great relocation plan but she didn’t. The exam stress was nothing compared to the stress of waiting to see if they were going to up sticks and move, Jess thought furiously.

But the thing that really destroyed Jess’s fragile self-confidence was the behaviour of Saffron Walsh.

Jess’s classmate Saffron had returned from holidays with a permatan (“sunbed,” snorted Steph scathingly) and a renewed determination to carry on her grudge against Jess.

“She’s never forgiven you for saying she had the individuality of a sheep in English class,” Steph sighed on the first day back, when Saffron and her gang banged into Jess one by one in the fifth-year locker room, murmuring “ugly bitch” under their breath.

“What do I care?” said Jess, but she did. She might have lost her train tracks—she’d almost kissed the orthodontist when he’d said they could come off—and she might be dating gorgeous Oliver from sixth year, but she was still easy prey for the vindictive Saffron.

It didn’t matter that Steph pointed out that Saffron only had it in for people she felt threatened by.

“Why should she be threatened by me?” grumbled Jess.

“You’re smarter than her, you’re dating a pretty cool guy, you look great without your train tracks, and you’ve got a famous mother. Not to mention the fact that she’s going to get zip in her exams. In Saffron’s eyes, you’re competition, so she hates you.”

Jess was just about able to put up with Saffron hating her—after all, she didn’t think much of Saffron either. What she couldn’t deal with was the sudden influx of horrible text messages on her mobile, all from a withheld number. “U thnk ur smthn special—ur not!” was the cleanest of them. Then, her new trainers were pulled from her gym locker and doused with nail varnish. Jess didn’t know why, but seeing the pristine, new, blue and white trainers all smeared with horrible blood-red polish really upset her. What hurt wasn’t so much that they were ruined, it was the fact that anybody could hate her enough to do this to her.

“You know it’s Bitch Walsh,” Steph said after the incident with the trainers. “Report her to Docker.” All the students called the headmistress, Mrs. Doherty, by the nickname of Docker.

“I can’t,” Jess said. “She’d have no proof and Saffron would really have it in for me.”

“Well, tell Oliver or, better still, your mum.”

But Jess stubbornly refused to tell Oliver. He’d got so serious and intense since he’d gone into sixth year.

“It’s the Leaving Cert in nine months: this is the most important year of my life,” he kept repeating anxiously. “I’m going to have to study hard this year, Jess. We won’t have as much time together, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said off-handedly to hide how hurt she was.

Jess knew that Oliver was ambitious and needed to do well in his exams so he could do science at university, but she didn’t see why he had to get so fired up the first week back at school.

The party, a big one held by an older friend of Zach’s, on the first weekend back in school, turned out to be the last straw. Jess had been so excited about it. She hoped that she and Oliver would have such a great time that he’d get over his just-back-to-school studying frenzy, and realise that fun wasn’t outlawed once you got to sixth year.

It was also the first party she’d been to with Oliver since the visit to the orthodontist. She felt more than halfway decent for the first time in her life.

“You’ll look fabulous,” Steph had ordained after a lengthy trawl through her wardrobe to find something suitable for Jess to wear. In the end, they’d decided on Jess’s own jeans and a silver mesh top with a black spindly-strap camisole underneath. Steph’s mother had a knobbly cardigan that looked like something from a designer label and Steph swiped it as a final cover-up “in case it’s cold when you’re snogging outside.”