Chapter 14
How was it possible for your legs to ache so much that you couldn’t even lift your foot to step on to the train to work? Or for you to not even be able to cross your legs without not just wincing but wanting to make the kind of noises women make in childbirth? Or to wonder if perhaps you had been unwittingly steamrollered the night before? Kitty had somehow managed to get herself dressed, out of the house and to work without fainting with pain, but at every step, she half-hoped she might collapse in a heap and some kind passer-by would call an ambulance and then – bliss! – she would be placed on a stretcher by two burly men, never to move again. It was going to take an intensive course of massage, warm baths and a month laid gently on a mattress to be back to her previous un-aching self.
Who knew football was so strenuous? Who knew that a low-key, low-stakes, low-energy game of local five-a-side could be so hard? Every molecule in her body ached. It hadn’t even been like this that time Shazza had made her go along to a Body Pump class because she fancied the instructor. And of course the reason why her whole being ached was because of Dave’s absconsion. The previous evening in the pub, she’d managed to forget all about him, but this morning, when she was lying in bed trying to work out which muscles hurt the least, she’d remembered that her life now consisted of waiting for him to come back. She had to spend this time wisely, she thought, and learn more about herself and work out how to be a better partner. Hopefully, the old Dave would return – a jokey, intelligent man who was good company and liked to go to the cinema and had ambitions involving dog ownership and camper-van holidays… instead of the more recent Dave.
In the office and at her desk, even typing was proving difficult because holding up her arms was hard. She shifted her legs, wincing in pain. She’d done what she said she’d do, she’d introduced more ‘fun’ into her life. She just hadn’t thought that so-called ‘fun’ could equal pain. If Dave would just call her or come home or say he loved her, she would feel less at sea. Being with him gave her life solidity and structure. Without him, it was unsettling, like floating in space.
She stared at her phone, knowing that she could just phone Dave again, and perhaps he would answer, and perhaps he would be pleased to hear from her. And then, just as she was staring at it, it rang. Finally! Telepathically they were connected and Dave had relented and would be coming home, and all this nonsense of football and frills could be shelved forever.
But instead of Dave, it was her father, Billy.
‘Kitty? How’s the form?’
‘Hi Dad… fine…’ She tried not to sound disappointed.
‘Grand, grand…’ said Billy. ‘So, any craic?’
‘None whatsoever. You?’
‘Ah, you know how it is. It’s to be found somewhere, so it is, you just have to be alert for it.’
Kitty’s father had never been lacking in the hunting down of craic. He was a man unsuited to family life, someone who found the responsibilities of fatherhood and marriage to be like a noose. Kitty could never understand how he and her mother had even managed to make it to just after Kitty’s fifth birthday before they both agreed that life would be easier if they separated.
‘Did I hear my daughter was now a footballer?’
The Sandycove grapevine was in fine fettle, she was unsurprised to hear.
‘It’s just a bit of fun,’ she said. Except it hadn’t been. At all.
‘The mixed five-a-side is meant to be fun,’ said her father. ‘Even though Tara Gilhooley doesn’t see it as such.’ He chuckled. ‘I’ll see you at the ground some evening… maybe we could go for a hot chocolate? You used to like them? You’d chat about school and all the other things you liked to do… I think there was a Tiny Pony thing…’
‘My Little Pony,’ said Kitty, mechanically.
‘Yes! That was the yoke. And you’d take an age to drink your chocolate…’ He gave another laugh. ‘Your favourite bit, you used to say, was the froth on the top and you’d scrape it off with your spoon like one of those Buddhist monks raking one of those gravel gardens. And you’d tell me about the books you were reading. And you’d tell me the plot in great detail… you were quite the storyteller…’
‘I was?’
Billy had lived in the States for most of her teenage years and the contact had become too sporadic, the bond they once had stretched too thin. Sometimes she wondered if her need to fix things with Dave had something to do with trying to have at least one dependable relationship with a man. Being on the other side of the Atlantic for so long, her father had lived a pretty carefree life, and when he was around, he’d been unreliable, turning up late, forgetting dates or missing events. He was the least dependable person she had ever known. He used to have to pick her up from school every Wednesday and he was always late and Kitty would have to sit on the kerb, being unofficially minded by the lollipop lady. Or there were the birthday parties, painstakingly organised by Catherine, that he would forget about or turn up on the wrong day. Or Kitty’s college graduation, where he arrived halfway through, pushing his way along the rows of knees. Growing up, she had cried herself to sleep when he let her down. She’d reached the end of her rope with him a long time ago. When, a few years earlier, Billy had returned to Sandycove, he would ring Kitty often, but she rarely called him back, or even accepted his calls.
Kitty felt her usual sadness that she and her father weren’t closer, but this was one relationship which she’d long realised was too complicated to fix, the gap between them was too big to ever overcome. Somewhere between the hot chocolates and the My Little Ponies and now, they’d lost each other. As adults, there wasn’t any common ground.
‘Bye, sweetheart,’ he was saying. ‘See you at the club.’
‘Which club?’
‘The football club! I’ll be down next time you’re there.’