Marian Keyes - Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married (42 page)

In the evenings I had to run to the laundromat to dry the sheets I'd left in before I went to work. Then I made his dinner, then there was usually some small crisis to deal with because he was forever burning things or breaking them or losing them.

I don't know when the tiredness turned to resentment. I kept it hidden for a long time because I was ashamed of it. Through guilt and misplaced pride, I even managed to hide it from myself for a while.

I began to miss my other life.

I wanted to go out and get drunk and stay up late and swap clothes with Karen and Charlotte and talk about boys and the size of their penises.

I was tired of having to be constantly vigilant, of always having to be there. A big part of the problem was that I had wanted to be perfect for Dad. I had wanted to be the one who took care of him better than anyone else. But I couldn't and then I didn't even want to. It wasn't a challenge anymore, it was a burden.

I was aware that I was a young woman, that looking after Dad wasn't my responsibility. But I would have died rather than admit it.

Taking care of the two of us seemed an awful lot harder than looking after just me. A lot more than twice as hard.

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And a lot more than twice as expensive.

Before long, money became a real worry. In the past, I had thought it was a problem, I never felt as though I had enough to buy essentials like new shoes and clothes. But now I was horrified to find I was afraid that I wouldn't have enough to cover essentials like feeding the two of us.

I couldn't figure out where it was all going. For the first time in my life I was afraid of losing my job. I mean, really afraid.

Everything had changed, now that I had a dependent. I suddenly under- stood why they say in marriage ceremonies, "Till debt do us part."

Except, of course, that I wasn't married to Dad.

It was easy to be generous with the money when I had plenty of it. I had never imagined that I would begrudge my father anything. That I wouldn't have given him the cut-off lycra shirt off my back.

But it wasn't true. As money got tighter, I resented having to give him any. I resented him saying to me every morning before I dragged myself off to work, "Lucy, love, could you leave some money on the table?"

I resented the worry. I resented having to ask for an advance on my paycheck. I resented having no money for myself.

And I hated what it did to me--the pettiness, the watching of every bite that went into his mouth, the watching of every bite that didn't go into his mouth. If I go to the trouble of buying food for him and cooking it for him, the least he could do is eat it, I thought angrily.

Dad got welfare money every two weeks, but I wasn't sure what he did with it. I ran the household on my salary alone.

"Couldn't he even buy a pint of milk?" I sometimes thought, in impotent rage.

I felt increasingly isolated. Apart from the people at work, lucy sullivan is getting married / 503

the only person I ever saw was Dad. I never went out with any of the people I used to see. I didn't have time, because it was so important to get home immediately after work. Karen and Charlotte kept saying they'd come out to visit me, but they made it sound like a trip to a foreign country. Anyway it was a relief that they didn't come--I didn't think I'd be able to act happy for an entire two hours.

I missed Gus terribly. I fantasized about him coming to rescue me. But I had no chance of running into him while I lived in Uxbridge.

The only person I saw from my old life was Daniel. He was always "dropping by" and I hated it.

Every time I answered the door to him my first thought was how big and sexy and attractive he was. Then my second thought was of the night that I threw myself at him and he'd refused to bed me. I burned with shame at the memory.

And, as if that wasn't hard enough to cope with, he constantly asked awkward questions.

"Why are you always so tired?" and, "You're going to the laundromat, again?" and, "Why are all your saucepans burned?"

"Can I do anything to help?" he asked over and over again. But my pride wouldn't let me tell him how bad things were with Dad.

I just said, "Go away, Daniel, there's nothing for you to do here."

The money situation got worse.

The sensible thing would have been to give up the apartment in Ladbroke Grove. After all, what did I gain by paying rent on a place I never stayed in? But, suddenly, I realized that I didn't want to, that I was terrified of having to do that. My apartment was my last link with my old life. If that went, it would be a sign that I was never going back, that I was stuck out in Uxbridge forever.

Ostensibly I went to get advice about Dad's bedwetting, but in reality it was a good plain old-fashioned cry for help. In the hope that he would tell me what I knew to be true wasn't really.

I hated going to Dr. Thornton. Not only was he a cranky old man who should have been put out to pasture years before, but, because I knew he thought our entire family was nuts. He'd already had to deal with me and my depression. And there had been that time when Peter was fifteen and he'd got his hands on a medical encyclopaedia and became convinced that he had every disease he read about. Mum was in to the doctor's office al- most daily with him as he worked his way alphabetically and hypochon- driacally through the book, exhibiting symptoms of Acne, Agoraphobia, Alzheimer's, Angina, Angst and Anthrax until finally someone blew the whistle on him. Even the Acne wasn't real. Although the Angst certainly was, by the time Mum had finished with him.

Dr. Thornton's waiting room was like the day of judgment, packed to the rafters with fighting children, screaming mothers and consumptive geriat- rics.

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When I was finally granted an audience with His Healingness, he was slumped across his desk, looking exhausted and bad-tempered, his pen poised over the prescription pad.

"What can I do for you, Lucy?" he asked wearily.

I knew what he really meant was, "I remember you, you're one of those crazy Sullivans. So? Losing it again, are you?"

"Well, it's not about me," I began hesitantly.

He immediately looked interested.

"A friend of yours?" he asked hopefully.

"Well, sort of." I agreed.

"Thinks she might be pregnant?" he asked. "Hmmmm, is that it?"

"No, it's..."

"Has a mysterious discharge?" he interrupted eagerly.

"No, nothing like that..."

"Very heavy periods?"

"No..."

"Lump in her breast?"

"No," I said, almost laughing. "It really isn't me. It's my dad."

"Oh him," he said, annoyed. "Well, why isn't he here? I don't do virtual diagnosis."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm sick of it," he burst out. "It's all mobile phones and internets, and computer games and simulated flights. None of you want to do anything real!"

"Er..." I said, shocked, not knowing how to respond to his outpourings of Luddite vitriol. He'd become slightly more eccentric since our previous encounter.

"You all think you needn't do anything," he went on in a high voice. His face was flushed. "You can just sit at home with your modems and your PCs and think you're 506 / marian keyes

living, that you needn't get off your lazy behinds and interact with other human beings. You just E-mail me your symptoms, is that it?" Physician, heal thyself! Dr. Thornton seemed to be cracking up.

Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, the fight went out of him.

"Well, what about your father?" he sighed, slumping back over his desk.

"It's a bit embarrassing," I said awkwardly.

"Why?"

"Well, he doesn't think there's anything wrong with him..." I started to delicately pick my way through the complicated story.

"Well, if he doesn't think there's anything wrong with him, and you do, then perhaps you're the one with the problem," said Dr. Thornton bluntly.

"No, listen, you don't understand..."

"I do understand," he interrupted. "There's nothing wrong with Jamsie Sullivan. If he cut out the booze, he'd be fine.

"Although maybe he wouldn't be," he added, as if he were talking to himself. "God alone knows what shape his liver is in by now. Probably hexagonal."

"But..."

"Lucy, you're wasting my time. I've got a waiting room full of sick people out there, really sick people, who need looking after. And instead I get the female Sullivans plaguing me, looking for cures for a man who has decided to drink himself to death."

"What do you mean, female Sullivans?" I asked.

"You. Your mother. Your mother is almost a permanent fixture here."

"Really?" I hooted with surprise.

"Well, actually, now that you mention it, she hasn't been here in a while. Sent you instead, has she?" lucy sullivan is getting married / 507

"Er, no..."

"Why not?" he asked. "What's happened?"

"She's left Dad," I said, expecting sympathy.

Instead he laughed. Kind of. He really was behaving oddly.

"So she finally did it," he chuckled, while I stared at him, my head on one side, wondering what was wrong with him.

And what was he talking about, saying that Dad was drinking himself to death? Why did everything come back to Dad and drinking?

Somewhere in my head, something had started its slow descent into place and I was frightened.

"And now you've taken over where your mother left off?" asked Dr. Thornton.

"If you mean, am I taking care of him, then, yes," I said.

"Lucy, go home," he sighed. "There's nothing you can do for your father; we've tried everything. Until he decides to stop drinking, nobody can do anything for him."

More things slotted into place in my head.

"Look, you've got it all wrong," I said, fighting against what I knew to be true. "I'm not here about his drinking. I'm here because there is some- thing wrong with him and it's got nothing to do with drinking."

"Well, what is it?" he asked impatiently.

"He wets his bed."

There was a silence. That's shut him up, I thought, nervously, hoping that it really had.

"Bed-wetting's an emotional thing," I went on, hopefully. "It's nothing to do with drinking."

"Lucy," he said grimly. "It's got everything to do with drinking."

"I don't know what you mean," I said, feeling sick 508 / marian keyes

with apprehension. "I don't understand why you're saying all these things."

"Don't you?" he frowned. "But you must know, of course you know. How can you live with him and not know?"

"I don't live with him," I said. "At least I haven't for years, I've just moved back."

"But hasn't your mother told you all about...?" he asked, looking at my sick, anxious face. "Oh. Oh. I see. She hasn't."

I could feel a trembling in my lower thighs, I knew what he was about to tell me. This was the disaster that I'd been avoiding all my life and now here I was face to face with it. This was the big one. There was almost a sense of relief, I could stop evading and avoiding now.

"Well," sighed Dr. Thornton. "Your father is a chronic alcoholic."

My stomach lurched. I had known and yet I hadn't known.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"You really didn't know, did you?" he asked, a little more kindly.

"No," I said. "But now that you tell me, I can't understand how I didn't know until now."

"It happens a lot," he said, wearily. "I see it over and over again, where there's something very amiss in a home and everyone acts as if there's nothing wrong."

"Oh," I said.

"It's as if they have an elephant in their living room and they all tiptoe around pretending not to see it."

"Oh," I said again. "Well, what can I do?"

"To be quite frank, Lucy," he said, "this isn't really my area. I only know about physical ailments. If you father had, let's say, an ingrowing toenail or maybe an irritable bowel, I could suggest all kinds of treatment. But this lucy sullivan is getting married / 509

family therapy, psychodrama, confrontation kind of stuff isn't something I'm familiar with. It came after my time."

"Oh."

"But are you feeling all right?" he asked hopefully. "Has all of this come as a shock? Because I can do shock, that's something I do know about."

"I'll be fine," I said, getting up to leave. I had to get away to deal with what he'd told me, I couldn't get out fast enough.

"No wait," he said urgently. "I could give you a prescription."

"What for?" I asked. "A new father? One that isn't an alcoholic?"

"Don't be like that," he said. "Sleeping tablets? Tranquilizers? Antide- pressants?"

"No thanks."

"Well, I've another suggestion that might be of help," he said thought- fully.

Hope ricocheted in my chest.

"Yes?" I asked breathlessly.

"Plastic sheets."

"Plastic sheets?" I asked faintly.

"Yes, you know, to protect the mattress from..."

I left.

I went away in a state of shock. When I got home, Dad had fallen asleep in his chair, leaving a cigarette burning into the armrest. He jerked awake when I came in.

"Will you run down to the liquor store for me, Lucy?" he asked.

"Okay," I said, too shell-shocked to argue. "What do you want?"

"Whatever you can afford," he said humbly.

"Oh," I said coldly. "You want me to pay for it?"

"Weeelll," he said vaguely. 510 / marian keyes

"But you got your check only two days ago," I said. "What did you do with it?"

"Oh Lucy," he laughed, kind of nastily. "But you're your mother's daughter and no mistake.

I left the house, subdued, feeling sick. Was I just like my mother? I wondered. At the liquor store I bought him a bottle of real whiskey instead of the funny cheap stuff from Eastern Europe that he usually got. But I was still edgy, still desperate to spend money on him, so I bought cigarettes and four bars of chocolate and two bags of tortilla chips.

When my expenditure hovered around the twenty-pound mark, I was able to breathe easy again, secure in the knowledge that my extravagance had destroyed any similarity to my mother.

I couldn't stop thinking about what Dr. Thornton had told me. I didn't want to believe him, but I couldn't help it. I tried looking at Dad in the old way and then in the light of him being an alcoholic. The alcoholic light fitted better. Fitted perfectly.

Dr. Thornton's revelation had knocked down the first domino, the rest were hitting the deck at high speed. Like red wine spilled on a white tablecloth, the knowledge poured through my life, back to my earliest memory, tainting everything.

And it should be tainted. It was tainted.

I had been looking at my life, my father, my family from upside-down, and suddenly it had come upright. I couldn't cope with the way everything really was.

The worst thing was that Dad looked different to me. Like someone I'd never met before. I tried not to let it happen. I didn't want the man I loved to waver and disappear right before my eyes. I had to love him. He was all I had.

That evening, I kept sneaking looks at him, at all the things that had happened, all the signs. I tried to control