Further Under the Duvet (12 page)

10)
Face-holes
. Wonderful inventions! They’ve taken away the necessity, when you’re lying on your stomach having back rubbage, of suffocating into your pillow. You lie face downwards, stick your face through the padded hole – and breathe normally! (I don’t know how we managed before them; I suppose death or brain damage from oxygen deprivation was just the risk I ran every time I had a back massage.) There’s just one thing, and I wish someone had told me the first time I used one: the mark can last for up to a week.

A version of this was first published in
Abroad,
January 2004
.

Most of my life, I’ve enjoyed bad health. I develop a bad ear infection, necessitating antibiotics, most Thursdays and I get everything that’s going – every cold, every bug, every virus – and usually manage to give it my own special twist. I can take an ordinary cold and, via some cunning add-ons, like a strep throat, I can parlay it into something really dramatic and croaky-voiced.

This is due to a combination of factors:

a) I’ve no stamina and my immune system is like a rusting 1989 Ford Fiesta.

b) I’m neurotic and a drama queen.

c) I love going to bed with a load of magazines and having people bring me cheese on toast and not be able to complain about it because I’m
sick
, see.

d) I’m extremely suggestible. If I hear of anyone else being unwell, I start to develop their symptoms. Which is fine when it’s an upset stomach or labour pains, but more of a challenge when it’s a twisted testicle.

If I’m very busy and stressed and I hear that a friend or family member is in bed with the flu, I always think, ‘God, the lucky yoke.’ You see, I’m just thinking about the lying-in-bed-having-someone-bring-me-cheese-on-toast
bit. I forget all about the feeling-atrocious bit, until it happens.

And then I’m very sorry. I don’t like feeling atrocious, not one bit, and by the afternoon of the second day if I’m not starting to feel a good bit better, I get a flash of alarm and a little voice in my head says,
This isn’t right
… This is no ordinary flu, I think. It’s far worse. It could be pneumonia. Or TB. Or cholera. And if it remains undiagnosed, I might die… (See, told you, drama queen.)

If I try disclosing my cholera-style anxieties to Himself, he just laughs and tells me to cop on. Himself, you see, almost never gets sick. And when he does, I take it very badly. You’d think that after all the running up and down stairs, bringing toasted cheese, that he does for me, I’d be prepared to repay the favour. But actually, no. I hate it when he’s not well because it doesn’t fit in with the way we’ve shared out the characteristics between us.
I
get sick and
he
fixes things.
I
put black wine gums over my teeth and pretend to be a seventy-year-old farmer chatting up an eighteen-year-old and
he
cuts the grass. If he starts crossing over into my territory and getting viruses, there’s a danger that I might have to migrate over to his and start being useful.

On the rare occasions when he does succumb to illness, I go into denial. Wait till I tell you how mean I am. We were on holiday in a lovely resort in Thailand and he got food poisoning. (It was kind of funny, we ate at street stalls in Bangkok, even Vietnam, without any harm befalling us and now in this fancy-dan resort he was after getting poisoned.) Anyway, we woke up one morning and he was sweating and
grey and had terrible stomach pains, so first I said that that was what it was like every month for women and now he knew what it was like. Then I asked (sarcastically, of course) if he wanted me to get a doctor and I got the fright of my life when he said yes. Right away I knew this must be extremely serious – because men just won’t go to the doctor. Even if their leg falls off, they go, ‘Ah, I’m grand, I never really used it anyway.’ And, if you persist, they go, ‘For God’s sake, leave me alone, I’m FINE. Stop BADGERING me. It’s only a leg, okay?’

I belted to the reception desk and although the resort didn’t have a doctor, it had a nurse. She’d be with us in ten minutes, I was promised.

Sure enough, ten minutes later the bell rang and I opened the door to find a sloe-eyed, blossom-faced babe waiting outside. The nurse.

She was like a nurse from a porn film. She wore a tiny short white outfit and a ridiculous little hat perched atop a head of long, swishy, blue-black hair. She tiptoed over to Himself, took his paw between her tiny soft hands and whispered in a gentle voice, ‘I will make you better.’

He gazed at her with unblinking adoration, like she was some sort of angel, while I watched, sour-faced, from the door. She produced a dinky bag (which just looked like a stripagram prop to me) and extracted all sorts of great stuff – painkillers, antibiotics, rehydrators and detoxers, which she helped him take by holding a glass of water to his mouth and supporting his head with her tiny hand. Then, with a final soothing touch on his forehead, she floated fragrantly out, promising to return to see him later.

Three hours later, a great improvement had been wrought in him. He was thrown in bed, watching CNN and smoking moodily (this was before he gave up – smoking, that is, not being moody), looking well on his way back to full health. Then the doorbell rang. ‘It’s her!’

He sat bolt upright in bed, switched off the telly and waved frantically, trying to disperse the cloud of smoke. Then he rearranged himself back on his pillows, deliberately trying to look wan and pitiful.

All smiles, in she tiptoed and we had a repeat performance of the head-supporting and hand-holding and when she said she would visit again later, I got in before him. ‘He’s fine!’

‘But –’ (From him.)

‘You’re fine,’ I told him, then turned to her. ‘He’s fine.’

See, I’m horrible. Could I not just have let him enjoy being sick for a while? After all, it happens so rarely. Which brings me to a very important point: there’s a myth that men are stoical. But actually, men aren’t stoical. Men are
healthy
. Women get sick a lot so we’re quite comfortable with it. But men have no practice so when they
do
get ill, they make a right song and dance about it.

Like the time my dad went into hospital to have his hip replaced. It’s a straightforward enough operation, even though it sounds gruesome as anything – the patients are conscious so they get to hear their bones being sawed. (Even writing this, I’m getting twingy stabs in my hips.) Naturally enough, before Dad went in, he wasn’t exactly in the best of form and he had a good old shout at Tadhg, warning him not to drive his car while he was incarcerated. (Tadhg had only just learnt to drive and was tooling around in a rusty
pile of junk, the four-wheeled version of my immune system. He’d been looking forward to taking to the roads in Dad’s shiny, upmarket wheels but Dad was terrified that the boy-racer would damage them.)

Anyway, Dad had the op and it was a relief to hear that it had gone fine and he was recovering nicely. (We decided it would do him no good, no good
at all
, to know that Tadhg had found where he’d hidden the car keys and was driving the pride-and-joy all over Dublin.) But the following day, when Himself and myself went to collect Mammy Keyes to go to visit Dad, Mammy was looking ashen.

‘What?’

Her words were like a staple-gun to my heart. ‘Your father’s after taking a terrible turn for the worse. It’s very serious. He’s asking for a solicitor, he wants to change his will.’

Through numb lips, all I could mumble was, ‘Where will we get a solicitor?’

‘What about Eileen?’ Mam asked.

Eileen is my friend. She is indeed a solicitor, but she handles huge, multi-million company mergers, not some small-time will. All the same, with shaking fingers, I put a speedy call in to her – she was at a meeting – then we drove like the clappers to the hospital, rushed upstairs and raced down his corridor but when we reached Dad’s room, we slowed down, then stopped. We were afraid to go in. What if he was dead already? The door was ajar, so I put my fingers on it and pushed lightly. It swung open. I swallowed hard and forced myself to go in. And there he was. Sitting up in bed. Not dead. Not even slightly.

No, instead of being dead he was tucking into a big ‘dinnery’ dinner – I was dimly aware of mounds of mash, some sort of chops and loads of peas.

What the…?

‘Dad,’ I said, almost irritably. ‘We thought you were dying.’

‘Oh right,’ he chortled, through a mouthful of mash. ‘It was the painkillers.’

What about them?

He was allergic to whatever they’d given him – they’d ‘upset his stomach’. But as soon as they changed the prescription, he experienced a miraculous recovery.

‘Well, great,’ I said. But without conviction. Himself, myself and Mammy Keyes were a little thrown and found it hard to be nice to Dad for the first few minutes. I mean, as hypochondriacs go, I’m bad, I admit it. I’m one of the worst you’ll find but even
I
wouldn’t confuse an upset stomach with my imminent death. For a few happy days I felt wonderfully unneurotic.

(As a PS to this story, the reason Dad was asking for a solicitor was because in a fit of deathbed enlightenment he’d decided to leave his lovely car to Tadhg; but in a gorgeous cosmic juxtaposition, hadn’t Tadhg crashed the car only that very morning.)

First published in
Marie Claire,
March 2005
.

I have a crush on my hairdresser. I’m pitiful, I know, and you might think that this doesn’t relate to you in any way, but read on…

I’d been going to my regular fella, Jimmy, for a long while and he did a perfectly fine job. But one day he wasn’t there – one of the usual excuses: resitting his taxidermy exams/rescuing his sister from the Moonies/running for governor of California. But, said the receptionist, they had another fella just as good, who’d do me. Immediately all my antennae were on Gom Alert.

I am the kind of person who gets fobbed off with goms,
a lot
. I have a round, trusting face, and everyone from hairdresser receptionists to airline check-in staff thinks about me, She’ll never complain. Not only has she a round, trusting face, but she’s overweight and shame about that keeps her self-esteem low. I can actually
see
their thought processes. And they’re right – I never do complain. I simply swallow my rage and burn holes in the lining of my stomach instead.

I resigned myself to getting the worst hairdresser in the place and, sure enough, this vision approached me. Whippet-thin, dressed entirely in black, his eyes obscured with dark glasses, wearing three-foot-long winkle-pickers so pointy the last six inches were actually invisible. From visiting the salon
I knew him to see. He did his snipping and blow-drying still wearing his dark glasses and danced gracefully around his clee-yongs, like he was doing speeded-up t’ai chi. In other words, the biggest gom on the planet.

Feckin’ great!

True to form, I pushed down my fury, gave my incipient ulcers another shot in the arm, and stapled a smile to my round, trusting but miserable face. Then Gomboy opened his mouth and spoke. ‘’Allo Marrrrrreeeeannnne. I am Chrrrrrristian.’

French! He was French! Not a gom at all! In an instant everything changed.

Before we go any further, I have to say that I’m not one of those women who go wild swoony over Frenchmen. I think I must be the wrong age. The likes of my mammy would be mad about them, but my generation laugh scornfully at their smarmy accents and clichéd, overblown compliments masquerading as charm. All I’m saying is that Christian’s Rock God get-up suddenly made sense and I was relieved.

We sat knee to knee and he treated me with as much concern and tenderness as if he was giving me a cancer diagnosis. I told him how I’d like him to do my hair, then – and this is unheard of –
he did exactly what I asked for
. Even with the best hairdressers, this never happens. I blame myself. Clearly there is a gap between the vision in my head and the words I use to convey it. It doesn’t work even when I bring a picture and ask for an exact recreation. But Christian, as if he had a psychic transmitter in the toe of his winkle-pickers, accessed and downloaded the file in my imagination and reproduced it precisely.

I was thrilled, but next time I needed my hair done I went to Jimmy, because you have to, see? (This is the kernel of
my dilemma.) However, about a month later, Jimmy was once again MIA and hastily, before the receptionist allocated me elsewhere, I requested Christian.

Again, he was fantastic. It had become clear that if I asked him to blow-dry my hair into a perfect scale model of the Statue of Liberty, he would, no questions asked. Then – and this is where it gets good – midway through the blow-dry, he paused, removed his dark glasses (revealing beautiful dark eyes) and said, ‘I’ave ’ad you before? A monz ago, per’aps?’

I chortled that he had indeed ‘had’ me before and that he had a very good memory. With that, his eyes held mine in the mirror, a fraction too long and he murmured meaningfully, ‘Only somezimes.’

It had been so long since someone had flirted with me that it took me a moment to realize that that was what was actually happening. As soon as I got it, though, a great redness roared up my chest, neck and face, rushing to the tips of my ears and the roots of my hair, like a damburst. It was almost audible. But he wasn’t being slimy or sleazy, he was just… nice…

All of a pleasurable dither I hurried home and told Himself about the encounter. ‘He made me feel beautiful.’

Over the next few days I told everyone about Christian. He was so life-enhancing that I wanted everyone I loved to do themselves a favour by experiencing the delights of his attentions. Eventually I made Himself go. He was almost crying as I dispatched him; he’s afraid of hairdressers at the best of times. But when he returned – with lovely hair, I must say – he seemed quietly pleased. For the next couple of hours he spent an unprecedented amount of time looking at himself in the mirror, then suddenly exclaimed, ‘I never saw
it before but I’m quite good-looking, aren’t I?’ Shamefully he admitted, ‘I prefer him to Jimmy.’