Marian Keyes - Watermelon

a novel

Marian

Keyes

Prologue 1 One I'm sorry, you must think I'm very rude. We've hardly... 3 Two Judy picked me up from the hospital a couple of... 19 Three And so to the baggage pickup area! 28 Four I rushed out into the arrivals lounge. On the other... 32 Five And so to bed. 44 Six Wet and windy and miserable. For the first two weeks... 61 Seven The time that followed is still referred to in our... 71 Eight After Dad had given me my pep talk the previous... 86 Nine I had to ring the doorbell when we arrived back... 95 Ten Dinner was a bit of an odd affair because we... 102 Eleven After Adam left, and Helen had sent him out into... 115 Twelve The following day dawned bright cold and blustery. 122 Thirteen I was meeting Laura for a drink that evening. 140 Fourteen I had planned to call Mr. Hasdell, the lawyer whose... 163 Fifteen I spent Friday night watching television with Mum. I felt... 172 Sixteen The following day brought it home to me good and... 176 Seventeen Laura came out on Sunday afternoon and we lounged around... 189 Eighteen Time had slowed to a standstill while I had been... 200 Nineteen The next morning the house was like Grand Central Station. 210 Twenty The next day I wasn't much better. 217 Twenty-One The preparations for Sunday. 231 Twenty-Two I parked the car just outside his house and feeling... 235 Twenty-Three I parked the car and I put my key in... 253 Twenty-Four I went to bed and I was right. 257 Twenty-Five "Hello," I said, for lack of anything better to say. 265 Twenty-Six Now, I would be lying to both myself and you... 269 Twenty-Seven I barely managed to close the door behind him before... 282 Twenty-Eight I have to say that walking into that restaurant was... 289 Twenty-Nine I put my key in the door and, with a... 305 Thirty Dad woke me the following morning by thrusting a huge... 308 Thirty-One "So when are you leaving?" asked Mum. 322 Thirty-Two After the conversation with Adam on Tuesday, I worked hard... 331 Thirty-Three Just to make sure, I called Judy. 342 Thirty-Four When I came out of the station and onto the... 356 Thirty-Five I can't really remember much about the subway journey out... 371 Thirty-Six When I awoke the next morning, I felt a tiny... 375 Thirty-Seven I couldn't have said that I was happy. But I... 381 Thirty-Eight Men. 386 Thirty-Nine Kate was a lot happier inside. All smiles and gurgles... 400 About the Author Praise Other books by Marian Keyes Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher

February the fifteenth is a very special day for me. It is the day I gave birth to my first child. It is also the day my husband left me. As he was present at the birth I can only assume the two events weren't entirely unre- lated.

I knew I should have followed my instincts.

I subscribed to the classical or, you might say, the traditional role fathers play in the birth of their children. Which goes as follows.

Lock them in a corridor outside the delivery room. Allow them admit- tance at no time. Give them forty cigarettes and a lighter. Instruct them to pace to the end of the corridor. When they reach this happy position, in- struct them to turn around and return to whence they came.

Repeat as necessary.

Conversation should be curtailed. They are allowed to exchange a few words with any other prospective father pacing alongside them.

"My first," (wry smile).

"Congrats...my third," (rueful smile).

"Well done," (forced smile--is he trying to imply that he's more virile).

Feelings do tend to run high around this time.

Or they are allowed to fling themselves on any doctor who emerges ex- hausted from the delivery room, covered in blood up to his elbows, and gasp "Any news, Doctor???" To which the doctor might reply "Oh God no, man!--she's only three

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centimeters dilated." And your man will nod knowingly, while understand- ing nothing other than the fact that there is still a fair bit of pacing to go.

He is also allowed to let a spasm of anguish pass over his face when he hears the agonies of his loved one within. And when it's all over and mother and child have been cleaned up and mother is in a clean nightgown and is lying back against the lacy pillows looking exhausted but joyful and the perfect infant is suckling at her breast, then, and only then, should the father be permitted to enter.

But no, I gave in to peer pressure and agreed to be all new age about it. I was very doubtful, I can tell you. I mean, I wouldn't want any of my close friends or relatives at the removal of...say...my appendix. Humiliating! You'd be at such a disadvantage. All these people looking at you, at places of yourself you'd never even seen before, not even with a mirror. I didn't know what my large intestine looked like. And by the same token I didn't know what my cervix looked like. And nor did I want to. But half the staff of St Michael's Hospital did.

I felt at a great disadvantage. That I wasn't doing myself justice.

To put it simply, I was not looking my best. As I say, a humiliating kind of a business.

I'd seen enough macho inarticulate truck drivers on the TV, a tear in their eye, a catch in their voice, struggling to tell you about how being present at the birth of their child was the most pro...prof...pr...pr...deep! thing that ever happened to them. And I'd heard stories about beer-slugging jock rugby players who invited the entire team over to watch the video of their wives giving birth.

But then again, you'd wonder about their motives.

Anyway, James and I got all emotional about it and decided he should be there.

So that's the story of how he was there at the birth. The story of why and how he left me is a bit longer.

2

I'm sorry, you must think I'm very rude. We've hardly even been intro- duced and here I am telling you all about the awful things that have happened to me.

Let me just give you the briefest outline of myself and I'll save details like, for example, my first day at school until later, if we have the time.

Let's see, what should I tell you? Well, my name is Claire and I'm twenty- nine and, as I mentioned, I've just had my first child two days ago (a little girl, seven pounds, four ounces, totally beautiful) and my husband (did I mention his name is James?) told me about twenty-four hours ago that he has been having an affair for the past six months, with--and get this--not even his secretary or someone glamorous from work, but with a married woman who lives in the apartment two floors below us. I mean, how sub- urban can you get! And not only is he having an affair but he wants a di- vorce.

I'm sorry if I'm being unnecessarily flippant about this. I'm all over the place. In a moment I'll be crying again. I'm still in shock, I suppose. Her name is Denise and I know her quite well.

Not quite as well as James does, obviously.

The awful thing is she always seemed to be really nice.

She's thirty-five (don't ask me how I know this, I just do; and at the risk of sounding very sour grapes and losing your sympathy, she does look thirty-five) and she has two children and a nice husband (quite apart from my one, that is). And

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apparently she's moved out of her apartment and he's moved out of his (or ours, should I say) and they've both moved into a new one in a secret location.

Can you believe it? How dramatic can you get? I know her husband is Italian, but I really don't think he's likely to kill the pair of them. He's a waiter, not a Mafia stooge, so what's he going to do? Black pepper them to death? Compliment them into a coma? Run them over with the dessert trolley?

But again, I seem flippant.

I'm not.

I'm heartbroken.

And it's all such a disaster. I don't even know what to call my little girl. James and I had discussed some names--or, in retrospect, I had discussed them and he had pretended to listen--but we hadn't decided on anything definite. And I seem to have lost the ability to make decisions on my own. Pathetic, I know, but that's marriage for you. Bang goes your sense of per- sonal autonomy!

I wasn't always like this. Once I was strong-willed and independent. But that all seems like a long, long time ago.

I've been with James for five years, and we've been married for three years. And, my God, but I love that man.

Although we had a less than auspicious start, the magic took hold of us very quickly. We both agree that we fell in love about fifteen minutes after we met and we stayed that way.

Or at least I did.

For a long time I never thought I'd meet a man who wanted to marry me.

Well, perhaps I should qualify that.

I never thought I'd meet a nice man who wanted to marry me. Plenty of lunatics, undoubtedly. But a nice man, a bit older than me, with a decent job, good-looking, funny, kind. You know--one who didn't look at me askance when I mentioned The Partridge Family, not one who apologized for not being able to get me a birthday present because his estranged wife had taken all his salary under a court maintenance order, not one who made me feel old-fashioned and inhibited because I got angry when he said that he'd screwed his ex-girlfriend the night after he screwed me ("My God, you convent girls are so uptight"), not one who made me feel inad- equate because I

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couldn't tell the difference between Piat d'Or and Zinfandel (whatever that is!).

James didn't treat me in any of these unpleasant ways. It seemed almost too good to be true. He liked me. He liked almost everything about me.

When we first met we were both living in London. I was a waitress (more of that later) and he was an accountant.

Of all the Tex-Mex joints in all the towns in all the world, he had to walk into mine. I wasn't a real waitress, you understand, I had a degree in English, but I went through my rebellious stage rather later than most, at about twenty-three. Which is when I thought it might be a bit of a laugh to give up my permanent, wellish-paid job in Dublin and go off to the Godless city of London and live like an irresponsible student.

Which is something I should have done when I was an irresponsible student. But I was too busy getting work experience during my summer holidays then, so my irresponsibility just had to wait until I was good and ready for it.

Like I always say, there's a time and a place for spontaneity.

Anyway, I had managed to land myself a job as a waitress in this highly trendy London restaurant, all loud music and video screens and minor celebrities.

Well, to be honest, there were more minor celebrities on the staff then amongst the clientele, what with most of the staff being out-of-work actors and models and the like.

How I ever got a job there at all is beyond me. Although I might have been employed as the token Wholesome Waitress. To begin with I was the only waitress under eight feet tall and over eighteen. And although I might not have been model material, I suppose I had a certain, shall we say, nat- ural kind of charm--you know--short shiny brown hair, blue eyes, freckles, big smile, that kind of thing.

And I was so unworldly and naive. I never realized when I was coming face to well-made-up face with the stars of stage and television.

More than once I'd be serving (and I use the word in its loosest possible sense) some table of people (and I also use that word in its loosest possible sense) when one of the other waitresses would elbow me (sending scalding barbecue sauce

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into the unfortunate groin of a customer) and hiss something like, "Isn't that whatshisname from that band?"

And I might reply, "Which guy? The one in the leather dress?" (Remem- ber, these were the eighties.)

"No," she might hiss back, "the one with the blond dread-locks and wearing the Chanel lipstick. Isn't he that singer?"

"Er, is he?" I would stammer, feeling untrendy and foolish for not knowing who this person was.

Anyway, I loved working there. It thrilled me to the middle-class marrow of my bourgeois bones. It seemed so decadent and exciting to wake at one in the afternoon every day and go to work at six and finish at twelve and get drunk with the barmen and busboys afterwards.

While at home in Ireland my poor mother wept bitter tears at the thought of her daughter with the university education serving hamburgers to pop stars.

And not even very famous pop stars, to add insult to injury.

I had been working there about six months the night I met James. It was a Friday night, which was traditionally the night the OJs frequented our restaurant. "OJ" standing, of course, for Office Jerks.

At five o'clock every Friday, like graves disgorging their dead, offices all over the center of London liberated their staffs for the weekend so that hordes of pale, cheap-suited clerks descended on us, all wide-eyed and eager, looking for the stars and to get drunk, in any order you like.

It was de rigueur for us waitresses to stand around sneering disdainfully at the besuited clientele, shaking our heads in disbelieving pity at the attire, hairstyles, etc., of the poor customers, to ignore them for the first fifteen minutes or so of their visit, swishing past them, earrings and bracelets jangling, obviously doing something far more important than attending to their pathetic needs, and finally, after reducing them near to tears with frustration and hunger, to sashay up to the table with a huge smile, pen and pad at the ready. "Evening, gentlemen, can I get you a drink?"

It made them so grateful, you see. After that it didn't make a blind bit of difference if the drinks orders were all wrong

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and the food never came at all, they still left a huge tip, so lucky did they feel to get our attention.

Our motto was "Not only is the customer always wrong, he is likely to be very badly dressed into the bargain."

On the night in question, James and three of his colleagues sat in my section and I attended to their needs in my normal irresponsible and slap- dash fashion. I paid them almost no attention whatsoever, barely listened to them as I took their order and certainly made no eye contact with them. If I had I might have noticed that one of them (yes, James, of course) was very handsome, in a black-haired, green-eyed, five-foot-tenish kind of way. I should have looked beyond the suit and seen the soul of the man.

Oh shallowness, thy name is Claire.

But I wanted to be out back with the other waitresses, drinking beer and smoking and talking about sex. Customers were an unwelcome interference.

"Can I have my steak very rare?" asked one of the men.

"Um," I said vaguely. I was even more uninterested than usual because I had noticed a book on the table. It was a really good book, one that I had read myself.

I loved books. And I loved reading. And I loved men who read. I loved a man who knew his existentialism from his magic-realism. And I had spent the last six months working with people who could just about manage to read Stage magazine (laboriously mouthing the words silently as they did so). I suddenly realized, with a pang, how much I missed the odd bit of intelligent conversation.

Because I could raise the stakes in any conversation on the modern American novel. I'll see your Hunter S. Thompson and I'll raise you a Jay McInerney.

Suddenly the people at this table stopped being mere irritants and took on some sort of identity for me.

"Who owns this book?" I asked abruptly, interrupting the order placing. (I don't care how you want your steak done.)

The table of four men were startled. I had spoken to them! I had treated them almost as if they were human!

"I do," said James, and as my blue eyes met his green eyes across his mango daiquiri (even though he had, in fact, ordered a pint of lager), that was it, the silvery magic dust was sprin-

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kled on us. In that instant something wonderful happened. From the mo- ment we really looked at each other, even though we knew almost nothing about each other (except that we liked the same books) (oh, yes--and that we liked the look of each other), we both knew we had met someone special.

I maintained that we fell in love immediately.

He maintained nothing of the sort and said that I was a romantic fool. He claimed it took at least thirty seconds longer for him to fall in love with me.

Historians will argue.

First of all he had to establish that I had read the book in question also. Because he thought that I must be some kind of not-so-bright model or singer if I was working there as a waitress. You know, in the same way that I had written him off as some kind of subhuman clerk. Served me right.

"Have you read it?" he asked, obviously surprised, the tone of his voice actually implying "Can you read at all?"

"Yes, I've read all his books," I told him.

"Is that right?" he said thoughtfully as he leaned back in his chair, looking up at me with interest. A lock of his black silky hair had fallen across his forehead.

"Yes," I managed to reply, feeling slightly nauseous with lust.

"The car chases are good, aren't they?" he said.

Now, I should tell you here that there were no car chases in any of the books we were talking about. They were serious, profound books about life and death and similar matters.

"Jesus!" I thought in alarm, "handsome, intelligent and funny. Am I ready for this?"

And then James smiled at me, a slow, sexy smile, a knowing kind of smile, totally at odds with the pinstriped suit he was wearing, and I swear to you, my entrails turned to warm ice cream. You know, kind of hot and cold and tingly and...well...like they were dissolving, or something.

And for years afterwards, long after the initial magic had worn off and most of our conversations were about insurance policies and dry rot, all I had to do was remember that smile and I felt as if I had just fallen in love all over again.

We exchanged some more words.

Just a few.

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But they were enough to let me know that he was nice and clever and funny.

He asked for my phone number.

It was a fireable offense to give a customer my phone number.

I gave him my phone number.

When he left the restaurant that first night, with his three cronies, a blur of briefcases and umbrellas and rolled-up copies of the Financial Times and somber-looking suits, he smiled good-bye at me, and (well, I say this with the benefit of hindsight; it's very easy to foretell the future when it's already happened, if you know what I mean) I knew I was looking at my destiny.

My future.

A few minutes later he was back.

"Sorry"--he grinned--"what's your name?"

As soon as the other waitresses found out that a suit had asked for my phone number and, worse again, that I had actually given it to him, I was treated like a pariah.

But I didn't care. Because I had really fallen for James.

For all my talk of independence, I was actually a very romantic person at heart. And for all my talk of rebellion, I was as middle-class as you could get.

From the first time we went out together, it was wonderful. So romantic, so beautiful.

And I'm sorry to do this to you but I'm going to have to use a lot of clich�s here. I can see no other way around it.

I'm ashamed to tell you that I was walking on air. And I'm even sorrier to have to tell you that I felt like I'd known him all my life. And I'm going to compound things by telling you that I felt that no one understood me the way that he did. And as I've lost all credibility with you I might as well tell you that I didn't think it was possible to be that happy. But I won't push it by telling you that he made me feel safe, sexy, smart and sweet. (And sorry about this, but I really must tell you that I felt that I had met my missing other half and now I was whole, and I promise that I'll leave it at that.) (Except perhaps to mention that he was funny and great in bed. Now I mean it, that's all, positively all.)