Further Under the Duvet (16 page)

You’ll be hearing a bit about my family in this part, so to avoid confusion, here’s a brief introduction.

I’m the eldest of five and I’ve had the extreme good sense to pick siblings who live abroad.(So we can visit them and have a lovely time.)

I’ve, very cleverly, bagged a brother (Niall) who lives in Prague. Niall is married to Ljiljana, aka The Most Fabulous Woman On The Planet™. (She can make a fabulous three-course meal for six people from two mouldy tomatoes in the bottom of the fridge. She also speaks three languages fluently, is beautiful, kind and very funny.)

Niall and Lilers have two children, Ema and Luka. They are so very fantastic that Himself and myself (who have not been blessed with babas of our own) have offered large sums of cash to buy them. To our chagrin they keep refusing, so now we are considering plan B – reporting Niall and Lilers to the Praguish social services, accusing them of being bad parents, so Himself and myself will get custody! Ingenious, no?

Next in line is my sister (Caitríona) who lives in New York and is also very fabulous. She looks like a model, yet she can fix a broken ballcock. She is also the funniest person I’ve ever met.

The youngest are the twins Rita-Anne and Tadhg (pronounced Tyge) who are very, very nice – don’t get me wrong. I just can’t
help feeling they’re being a little unreasonable, still insisting on living in Dublin, no matter how many times I mention that I’ve heard that house prices are very low in the Seychelles.

Now to my mammy. Mammy Keyes is a legend; she is nearly as funny as Caitríona. She prays for Himself and myself and doesn’t mind that we’re dirty atheists who don’t deserve it. She also cooks for us. Every Thursday we go for our dinner and one week we get spaghetti bolognese, the next week we get chicken casserole, the next week we get spaghetti bolognese, the next week we get chicken casserole, the next week… Even when we’re out of the country, the pattern continues clicking away without us and on our return we just slot straight back in. It’s wonderful, a fixed point in an uncertain world.

My dad is very kind. If I’m ever coming to visit on a Tuesday or Friday afternoon, he includes me in the Telly Bingo tickets. Sometimes he also buys me a bar of chocolate to heighten my enjoyment. He is very proud of my success, even though he never reads my books. Thing is, see, he read my first, which had a sex scene in it and as a result we couldn’t make eye-contact for the next six months, so now we’ve come to a lovely, tacit agreement: he won’t read my books and I won’t mind. Nevertheless, he knows
everything
there is to know about publishing. He used to be an accountant so he brings his keen mathematical brain to analyse my career. He knows how I’m doing, how many books I’ve sold, what my market share is, how my rivals are selling, who is due a book out that will knock me off my perch
…

He’s very, very loyal. Sometimes I go into my local bookshop only to discover that an entire wall is devoted to face-outs of my books. Supportive and all as the shop are to me, I get a bad feeling. ‘Is he…?’ I ask the manager. ‘Was he…?’

‘Yes,’ she sez, ‘your dad was in again.’

‘Sorry,’ I sigh, ‘I’ll have a word.’

Finally, I am married to Himself, who is beyond description.

I never win anything. Nothing. Not raffles, or scratchcards, or poker, or penny cascades, or the lotto. Nothing. And even though many, many lovely things have happened to me in my life, at heart I consider myself to be an extremely unlucky person. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s only so much good fortune in the world to go round and if someone else is getting it, it leaves even less for me. Take Telly Bingo, for example. It’s on every Tuesday and Friday on the telly (the clue is in the name), Mam and Dad are devoted to it and if I’m over visiting them, I’m devoted to it too. But I’ve never won anything: not a ‘Full House’; not a ‘Four Corners’; not even a single line (you can get
up to
12 euro in prize money for that).

I always start off in fabulous form, my pen poised over the card, frothy and giddy with hope. It could be me, I tell myself. I’ve as much chance as the next person. But as the minutes pass and the balls are called and I’ve only ticked off three numbers and the computerized scoreboard yoke is telling me there are fifteen people in County Monaghan needing only one more number to win the jackpot, I slip deeper and deeper into a depression. Why does nothing nice ever happen to me? Why is it always other people? Why has God got it in for me? And even though I’m usually supposed to be
staying at my parents for the whole afternoon, as soon as the final ball is called, I find myself sloping off home and when Himself opens the front door, surprised to see me back so early, he takes in my gloomy aspect and says, ‘Oh no! Not the Telly Bingo! Stay away from it!’

And yet the hope always returns. So when I heard about Dad’s golf club’s Christmas fundraiser bingo night, I couldn’t wait to go. Apparently there would be ten rounds of bingo and, according to Mam,
loads
of prizes. I quizzed her on them. ‘Poinsettias, Christmas crackers, bottles of Jameson, boxes of biscuits, teddy bears.’

‘Christmas hampers?’

‘Sometimes.’

Surely, if there were that many prizes to go round, I had a chance of winning
something
?

Seven of us signed up: Himself and myself, my parents, Rita-Anne, Tadhg’s girlfriend, Susan, and Mam’s friend Ann Carty. Although kick-off wasn’t until 8 p.m., Dad made us arrive at the golf club at seven-thirty. Mind you, we considered ourselves lucky he hadn’t made us get there at a quarter to five – if a journey takes twenty minutes, Dad prefers to allow an hour and three-quarters just to be on the safe side. All the same, at seven-thirty trade at the golf club was already brisk. Books of bingo cards were rapidly changing hands and raffle tickets were being hustled. People were flooding in, baggsying tables, buying drinks and glad-handing all over the place. Funnily enough I’d expected all the golf people to be in their funny Rupert the Bear trousers and dodgy Pringle jumpers, but they were in civvies so they seemed quite normal. From what I could gather from all the people
my mother kept introducing me to, a lot of the golf people were also bridge people. Clearly quite a competitive bunch. My heart sank slightly.

And then I noticed the table of prizes! I suspected it would be bad form to check them out – I should have been thinking about the socialness of the occasion, or the charity the night was in aid of – but I was
dying
to see what I might win. I had high hopes for a hamper. Himself and myself had kept ourselves awake the previous night making a wish-list of all the lovely things you’d find in the perfect hamper: a cheeseboard, a bottle of port, a Christmas pudding, a jar of brandy butter, crystallized fruit, a 200g bag of Percy Pigs…

I went up with Susan to check out the prizes and Susan was
fantastically
scornful. (Because the golf club didn’t let Tadhg wear jeans or baseball caps she’d thought of the place as intimidatingly posh, so she’d expected their prizes to also be posh. Nothing like a bit of disappointment to release the bile.) Poking fun at the ranks of poinsettias, she said they were like
The Day of the Triffids
– with several all lined up together, they looked quite menacing, almost alive. But the bitterest of her bile was reserved for the boxes of Rover biscuits. I had never heard of them (and God knows, if anyone knows about biscuits, it’s me), but Susan assured me they were horrible. So horrible that she’d thought they didn’t even make them any more. Someone must have had them in their attic for the last fifteen years and donated them, she said. In fact, someone must have died and their house was being sold and the Rover biscuits must have been found when the attic was being cleared out before the new people moved in, she suggested. Or else someone had won them for the last
twenty years and kept redonating them. I’m very suggestible and although I thought the prizes were lovely (boxes of Roses and non-dodgy, non-Rover biscuits) the more Susan mocked, the more I joined in. Not only am I very immature but something about being in a place where lots of my parents’ friends were present had made me revert to teenage brattery.

When we returned to the table, I leant over and quietly told Mam, ‘Susan says the prizes are crap.’

Mam hissed back, ‘It’s for charity, keep your voice down. And there’s loads of vouchers for turkeys, it’s just that the turkeys aren’t here and you can’t see them, but they’re very good prizes.’

Then, on another table, I spotted the raffle prizes – different to the bingo prizes. And I could see a hamper! Already I was pulling Susan to her feet. This I had to see.

‘Sit down,’ Mam begged. ‘Let it alone, be good.’

But we were up and pushing through the noisy throng and the first thing I saw behind the cellophane was a jar of supermarket-brand jam, then a jar of Nescafé. ‘Look – Bran-ston pickle,’ Susan choked and clutched me. ‘Jacob’s crackers,’ I riposted. ‘A lovely Christmas hamper, total value two euro twenty.’ We convulsed quietly, then across the room, I caught Mam’s eye and abruptly my mirth dissolved. And in all fairness, in a second layer behind the first extremely poor one, there was a bottle of Smirnoff, a bottle of port, smoked salmon and a white envelope which must have been one of the famed turkey vouchers. No bag of those much-loved delicacies, Percy Pigs, mind…

Shortly after eight, the games began. A hush fell and balls were called and numbers were ticked and brows were
furrowed and concentration was high. Win, I urged myself. Go on, win. But in no time at all, a woman at another table called, ‘Check!’ – which meant ‘Bingo’ although I don’t know why we weren’t allowed to shout ‘Bingo’ – and her card was ferried away to be verified. Amazingly, she was wrong! Everyone (not just at our table,
everyone
) exchanged small, mean-spirited smirks and someone at the other end of the room yelled, ‘Swizzer!’ Mam elbowed me and scolded, ‘Stop that!’

Flustered and red-faced, the woman denied charges of trying to pull a fast one, bleating some makey-upey story about wearing the wrong glasses and not being able to see the numbers properly. No one believed her, of course, then the games resumed. However, a short time later another woman called, ‘Check!’ and this one really had won. Her prizes were brought to her table (a poinsettia, a box of Roses, a Beanie Baby and a bottle of wine), everyone clapped graciously and I clapped too, but the downward slide in me had begun. Already the night was losing its lustre. Already everyone looked luckier than me.

A new game began and obediently I ticked numbers, musing on how terrible it was to be constitutionally unlucky and wondering what it felt like to be a golden girl who won everything. Then I noticed that I needed only three more numbers for a full card. Yeah well, what was the point getting excited? Millions of people would beat me to it. Then I ticked another, and saw I needed only two more. Then, out of nowhere, all I needed was
one
number: sixty-five. Which was when the caller said, ‘Retirement age.’
Retirement age?
But wasn’t that…? ‘Sixty-five!’ he called. ‘Sixty-five.’

Sixty-five! Christ! I’d won! ‘Check!’ I called, while everyone
at the table looked up from their cards in surprise. What was I doing winning something? That wasn’t right.

‘Stop your messing,’ Dad said anxiously. ‘They know me here.’

They were afraid it was going to be just like the lady with the wrong glasses all over again and I can’t say I wasn’t anxious that I was about to make a prize gom of myself, but my card was checked – and found to be correct! Next thing two ladies were moving through the tables, bringing me my prizes – two bottles of wine, a box of biscuits (not the Rover ones), a poinsettia and a box of Terry’s chocolates. Everyone clapped me warmly and I smiled graciously around the room, savouring the moment, one of the pleasantest of my life to date. ‘Just call me Lucky,’ I murmured.

Off we went again but before the ticking recommenced in earnest, I warned the rest of our table, ‘That’s all our luck used up now, okay? We might as well go home.’

‘Feck off,’ someone whispered softly and although I looked sharply at all of them, I couldn’t establish who it was.

It was very soothing, ticking numbers, now that I’d won something. All the anxiety was gone, I was calm and at peace. Tick. Nice and easy. And another tick. Not a bother. And another tick. And then I noticed something very odd. I had only two numbers left to go. Then one: thirty-seven. ‘Thiiiirrrrrteeeee,’ the caller said, and my heart nearly stopped, ‘six,’ he finished. ‘Thirty-six.’

Ah okay. ‘And the next one up from that,’ he said.
The next one up from thirty-six?
But wasn’t that…? ‘Thirty-seven!’

‘Um, lookit,’ I said to the others. ‘I’ve won again.’

‘I’m warning you.’ Dad glared.

But I had won! My card was full. ‘Um, check,’ I called apologetically. A roomful of faces turned to me, their delight kind of freezing and fading when they saw it was me. Again.