Whose Life is it Anyway? (4 page)

‘They may need a little time to adjust to that fact.’

‘Introducing me to them is the best thing to do. Once they see how much I love you, they’ll come round.’

‘The thing is, Pierre, they’re kind of old-fashioned. My dad would freak if I went out with a Protestant, so a black agnostic is going to be tough for him to accept. We need to tread very softly. Trust me.’

‘That’s why we need to work on your mother first. I’m great with mothers. They love me. Once we have her on-side, your dad will follow.’

He just wasn’t getting it. ‘To be honest, my mother isn’t going to like it either. She has high hopes that I’m going to end up with a nice Irish Catholic doctor. You have to let me break it to them very slowly.’

‘How slowly?’

‘Very.’

‘Hours.’

‘I said slowly.’

‘Days?’

‘Months.’

‘Joking?’

‘Deadly serious.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Believe me, it’ll be easier in the long run. Let me do it at my own pace. I know my parents and I know how to deal with them. This is going to be a big shock for them.’

‘You were born and bred in England. How realistic was the chance of you ending up with an Irish Catholic?’

‘I’m the only person in my family – and I have nine married cousins – to live with someone not of Irish descent and Catholic.’

‘You mean to tell me that none of your cousins have gone out with non-Irish Catholics?’

‘No. One cousin, Dermot, went out with a Swedish girl for a while but it didn’t last. My uncle refused to speak to his son or the Swede until they broke up. He eventually married an Irish Catholic.’

‘That’s insane.’

‘That’s my family, Pierre. My father and his brothers are obsessed with keeping things traditional. So far, they’ve succeeded.’

‘Why move to London? Why not stay in Ireland?’

‘There were few opportunities here in the sixties. They emigrated to make a better life. If they could have stayed at home in Ireland they would have.’

‘My parents emigrated for a better life too, but they integrated into French and then English society. They didn’t try to create a Martinique ghetto and force their offspring to intermarry.’

‘It’s different.’

‘Why?’

‘From what you’ve told me, your parents couldn’t wait to get out of Martinique and never wanted to go back. My father still gets tears in his eyes when he talks of his childhood. He plans to move back to Ireland when he retires. And the other difference is that your parents are both only children.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ asked the only child.

‘My father and his four brothers all emigrated and work together. Their wives became friends and we went everywhere with our cousins. It was a ready-made social life. Everyone we knew growing up was Irish, our doctor, dentist, accountant, milkman, butcher. You name it, they were Irish.’

‘That defeats the whole purpose of emigrating. You’re not making the most of your new life. You’re not integrating.’

‘They don’t see it that way. They think their values, morals and principles are better than anyone else’s and they’re trying to protect their children.’

‘But you can’t protect a child from outside influences.’

‘You can try very hard.’

‘Isn’t it stifling to live that way?’

‘Yes and no. On the one hand it’s lovely to have such a big network of people who love you. Whenever anything happens to one person in the family, everyone comes together to help them. You can’t buy that kind of love and loyalty. On the other hand you never get a minute to yourself and it can be claustrophobic and overbearing at times, which is why I left. I needed to breathe by myself.’

‘Wouldn’t Australia have been better – further, more adventurous?’

‘Yes, but then I wouldn’t have met you.’

‘No, but you might have met a nice Australian-Irish Catholic boy, which would have been an easier sell.’

‘I’ve never taken the easy road.’

‘How difficult is it going to be for them to accept me?’

‘Scale of one to ten?’

‘Yes.’

‘Eleven. But you’re worth it.’

‘Can I do anything to help?’

‘Be patient and trust me. I love you and I will tell them all about you. But you have to let me do it my way.’

‘OK. But don’t wait too long. I’d like to meet them before I’m old and grey.’

‘You are old.’

‘OK, grey, then.’

Irish Daily News

‘The Blind Date Set Up’

Niamh O’Flaherty

Jane, Fred and Paul are discussing Paul’s upcoming blind date with Fiona. Jane and Fred know Fiona. Paul doesn’t.

PAUL
: ‘What’s she look like?’

JANE
: ‘Oh, she’s lovely. She has the most amazing skin. She tans so easily.’

PAUL
: ‘Skin?’

FRED
: ‘Skin?’

PAUL
: ‘Who gives a toss about skin?Is she a minger?’

JANE
: ‘No! She’s really attractive. And good skin is a huge deal.’

FRED
: ‘No, it isn’t.’

JANE
: ‘Really?’

PAUL
: ‘Trust me, I don’t care about how good a tan she gets.’

JANE
: ‘All that money I’ve wasted on fake tan.’

PAUL
: ‘Is she good in bed?’

JANE
: ‘I don’t know!’

FRED
: ‘She looks a bit gamey. She’s not exactly Angelina Jolie, I’d say she’d be grateful for a shag.’

PAUL
: ‘So she’s a minger who gets a tan in the summer.’

FRED
: ‘No, she’s not a minger, she scrubs up well. Sticky-out ears. Looks a bit like your one in
Spiderman
.’

JANE
: ‘Kirsten Dunst?No, she doesn’t.’

FRED
: ‘She looks like her uglier sister.’

PAUL
: ‘Uglier sister, your one’s no supermodel.’

FRED
: ‘Nice rack, though.’

PAUL
: ‘I like big tits.’

JANE
: ‘She has the most amazing wrists – they’re tiny.’

FRED
: ‘Wrists?’

PAUL
: ‘Wrists?’

JANE
: ‘It’s incredible, they’re so delicate. She can never find a bracelet small enough to fit her.’

Fred and Paul look at each other and sigh.

PAUL
: ‘Good legs?’

FRED
: ‘Hockey legs.’

PAUL
: ‘Chunky?’

FRED
: ‘’Fraid so.’

JANE
: ‘She does not have chunky legs. They’re half the size of mine.’

Silence.

JANE
: ‘Jesus, do I have big fat legs?’

Silence.

5

London, June 1985

Growing up is difficult enough when you’re not blessed with beauty or brains, but it certainly didn’t help with a father who insisted on re-creating rural Ireland in the middle of London. Trying to fit in and make friends is not easy when your house is a shrine to Ireland. My father thought that if he only allowed his three children to live, breathe and think things Irish, we would somehow be saved from the perils of becoming English.

We had a tricolour hanging from a flagpole in our garden, the hedge was cut in the shape of a shamrock, we had leprechaun gnomes with fishing-rods sitting round the pond and the doorbell was set to the tune of ‘Danny Boy’.

We were known as the ‘mad Paddies’. My father spoke Gaelic to us when we were out in public, even though none of us could understand a word he said. Well, my saintly sister Siobhan pretended she understood him, while I begged him to keep his voice down in case anyone heard him.

‘You should be proud of your heritage,’ he’d say. ‘You come from the land of saints and scholars. Hold your head high and proclaim your Irishness.’

It was all very well for him, but I was a fourteen-year-old trying to blend in. Besides, I didn’t feel Irish. I was born and bred in London. England was the only home I had ever known and I liked it. What was the use of learning Gaelic? No one else spoke it. I hated everything Irish. It made us stand out and I was desperate to fit in.

The problem was that my older sister Siobhan loved all things Irish. She also happened to be good at Irish dancing. In fact, she was brilliant. She’d come second in the Great Britain Irish-dancing Championship the year before and my father had almost burst with pride. He’d kept saying it was the best day of his life, until he felt the weight of my mother’s glare, and added that, of course, his wedding day had been the best day, this was the second best.

I hated Irish dancing with a passion. It was about as cool as train-spotting. You had to wear ridiculous dresses that looked suspiciously like they had been made out of curtains – even Fräulein Maria in
The Sound of Music
would have had a hard time making dresses as hideous as those.

Then there was the hair-curling. You had to have ringlets, no matter what. You were forced to sleep with damp hair in curlers with the big pins drilling holes through your skull. No sweet little rags tied in bows like Nellie Olsen in
The Little House on the Prairie
for us – it was Roller City. When you woke up the next day, in my case with fuzzy clumps of knotted hair from thrashing about in the bed trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in, the torture really began. The rollers had to be extracted from the knots, and my mother was not blessed with the patience of a saint or, say, Caroline Ingalls (neighbour of the Olsen family, wife of Charles and mother of Laura, Mary, Albert and Carrie). The rollers were ripped out of my head, pins and lumps of hair in tow, while she huffed and puffed about unruly hair and bloody ringlets.

You see, secretly my mother hated doing the ringlets and found Irish-dancing competitions very dull, but she knew how much they meant to my father so she played along. I heard her telling my auntie Nuala one day that her idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon was to curl up on the couch with a good book. Instead of which, she spent all her weekends sitting in cold town halls watching curly dancing curtains jump about the stage with their hands pinned to their sides.

Anyway, while my sister’s hair bounced out of the rollers in perfectly formed ringlets that Shirley Temple would have coveted, mine always hung in limp clumps. So I’d end up having them tied back in an enormous bow (made of the same bright green curtain material as the dress) and then we’d go to the competition. Siobhan, looking angelic, would leap gracefully about the stage, twisting and clicking her legs like Michael Flatley on speed, while I would try to do the same but end up like someone with a bad case of St Vitus’s Dance. I just couldn’t – no matter how hard I tried – keep my hands still. It wasn’t natural and they always flew up as I danced. I also wasn’t blessed with a huge amount of co-ordination, and dancing in general was clearly not my forte. I wasn’t sure what my forte was – if, indeed, I had one – but I was damn sure it wasn’t Irish dancing, and at fourteen years of age, time was running out and I wanted to explore other possibilities.

I decided I’d have to tell my father so I ran my speech by Siobhan and Finn.

‘Dad, I’m sorry but I don’t want to do any more Irish-dancing lessons. I’m not good at it and I hate it,’ I said, frowning into the mirror.

‘You must be mad,’ said Siobhan, admiring her legs. ‘He’ll do his nut if you stop. You know what he’s like.’

‘Niamh,’ my younger brother, Finn, said, ‘you’re going to have to come up with something better than that. Otherwise he’ll hit the roof. Think of a good reason why you can’t do it any more – like a new hobby. Tell him you want to take tin-whistle lessons to learn the old Irish songs, or concentrate on camogie or something like that.’

My brother Finn had got out of having to do Irish dancing by excelling at hurley. He said Irish dancing was for fags and there was no way he was going to prance around on a stage in a velvet suit. He was sympathetic to my plight.

‘But I don’t want to play a made-up Irish game where you run after a little ball with a stupid stick,’ I wailed. ‘I want to do tap-dancing classes with Sarah. She said it’s brilliant.’

‘You’re a sucker for punishment,’ said Finn, in alarm. ‘Look, bring it up at dinner tonight and I’ll do what I can to help you out. But he’s going to go mad.’

Later that day, I waited until my mother had served everyone their apple crumble, then pounced.

‘Dad,’ I said, my voice shaking, ‘you know the way I’m not very good at Irish dancing and Siobhan is brilliant and wins all the competitions? Well, there’s something I think I could be really good at and Sarah’s started lessons already and says it’s great fun. So I was wondering if maybe I could stop Irish dancing and take up tap instead. If that’s OK with you.’