Chapter 4
DEATH BY CARAMEL SQUARE
Becca
I would like to say I felt sad at handing Miss Clara back to her slightly hungover parents this morning, but the truth is, I didn’t.
I still don’t. I love her with every part of my being but I am already finding that one of the best things about being a grandparent is that you get to hand the child back.
I’d managed to get a quick hour’s nap before getting up, showered, dressed and ready to switch from my grandparent duties to my daughter duties.
I wrote a piece for Northern People about this.
How these are our ‘sandwich years’. Here we are, stuck in the middle of two very different generations, trying to care for both and sometimes neglecting ourselves in the process.
It is a pretty powerful piece, if I say so myself.
It created quite the buzz on the Northern People Facebook page.
It’s seven months since my first article appeared in the magazine and my nerves were in shreds at being so open and honest about some pretty personal matters on life as a ‘woman of a certain age’.
We’ve had every kind of response – from women agreeing and sharing their own experiences, to anonymous trolls with flags in their profile pictures calling me horrendous names and saying I didn’t deserve to be a mother, or a daughter, or a granny for that matter.
A few of them were even so lovely as to comment on my appearance, my weight, and my slightly wonky smile in none-too-kind a fashion, and I can admit I had a bit of a ‘menty b’ as the younger generation would call it.
I was just about to book an all-expenses trip to Turkey for a total body transformation when Conal – the man who is, I suppose, my boyfriend even though we are both too old for that term to sound appropriate – reminded me of all the parts of me he thinks are just bloody perfect.
It’s hard to exist in a place of self-loathing while in the afterglow of some of the finest sex I have ever known.
So I had shut out the trolls and concentrated on the voices of the many women who related.
And now, as I tell Daniel to be a good boy and mind the house while I go and take his granny to Asda, I wonder how many of those women are doing the same.
How many helped get their grandchildren to school that morning, or spent hours counselling their children through their latest crisis.
How many have become chauffeur to their parents, or carer in the harder times that inevitably come with ageing.
I think of how so many of them – of us – are also trying to hold down careers and I am very grateful that I have been able to carve out some time for myself in this past year because I fully realise how easy it is to become completely caught up in responsibility and forget about fun.
And I am so determined that there is still fun to be had in this life. I am still intent on proving my teenage self – sixteen-year-old Becki (with an ‘i') – wrong, or right… or something and becoming the person she hoped we would be as our fifties start to loom large.
Clearly there is no better way to do that than to load two women in their seventies – my mother and her neighbour Mrs Bishop – into my car and take them to do their weekly shop.
Today, the badness is on them. I used to use that expression about my twin boys when they were still in their pre-school era and prone to getting up to all sorts of mischief. Today, I’m using it in relation to my mother. It’s the real circle of life.
‘Rebecca,’ my mother says as she clicks on her seatbelt.
Both she and Mrs Bishop are sitting in the back of my car.
Despite the light dusting of Daniel hair and muddy footprints all over the back seat, fresh from our early morning turn around the park, both women were content to sit together and leave me alone in the front like a taxi driver.
‘Yes, Mum,’ I say, glancing up at the rear-view mirror to catch her reflection. I see it, and the canny little smirk on Mrs Bishop’s face too.
‘Do you and your boys watch those TockTock things?’
‘TikTok?’ I ask, cold dread creeping down my spine.
‘Aye, maybe,’ my mother says. ‘The videos everyone makes. Like mini TV shows or comedy sketches. Adam was showing some of them with funny dogs and they were so good.’ She grins and her neighbour does too.
I try to convince myself that this is the sum total of the conversation.
That she simply wants to tell me about the funny dog videos.
‘Yes. The dog videos are brilliant. Adam and I send them to each other all the time,’ I say.
‘Adam put that thingy on my phone for me so I’m able to watch them myself now,’ she says. ‘I was flipping through them…’
‘Scrolling. That’s what people say. Scrolling.’
‘Or doomscrolling,’ Mrs Bishop butts in with an air of pride about her. Imagine knowing the young folks’ lingo.
‘Yes, well, I was scrolling,’ my mother says, ‘and do you know what else is on there?’
I’m not sure how to answer this. Given that there is a seemingly unending wealth of content available.
Does she want me to reply ‘conspiracy theories’, ‘a virtual shopping centre that sells all sorts of weird stuff’ or maybe ‘that wee fellah from up the road who speaks like a sickly Victorian child’? It could be any number of things.
‘Lots of stuff,’ I say, glancing back at the road and the rear of the tractor that pulled out in front of us.
I swear on my life there’s a whole clatter of tractors that sit in fields between Derry and Strabane just waiting for signs of a car coming towards them before they roll out and bask in the enjoyment of keeping some poor soul trundling along at half the speed limit.
‘Well yes,’ my mother says. ‘Lots of stuff but we found all these videos of seniors – they call it eldertok – and these people were making great videos, doing dances and comedy, and…’
‘And get-ready-with-me videos,’ Mrs Bishop chimes in. ‘They film themselves doing their make-up and all. All those serums and layers and layers of make-up. Madness. And they tell you a big story while they’re doing it.’
I already have a sinking feeling where this is going.
In the year since my own epiphany about the passage of time and grabbing life by the short and curlies, my mother and her neighbour have found their own new lust for life.
They have gone on holiday together, joined a book club, taken full advantage of their senior citizen bus passes and developed an obsession with Ubers.
They even went to one of those Crazy Bingo events – where dance music is pumped through the sound system and everyone gets blootered on prosecco.
They were not a fan of that, but they at least gave it a go.
Everything, they seem to think, is worth ‘giving a go’, which is exactly why I’m starting to feel very nervous.
‘We’re going to make a video,’ my mother announces with pride. Roisin Burnside – the woman I have long considered to have been born sensible and reserved – is actually telling me she’s going to make a TikTok.
I have to handle this carefully – just as I did the mad notions of the boys when they were little and would announce that they were going to jump out the window and try to fly, or see how many sweets they could eat before their tummies actually exploded.
‘Sounds great,’ I say through gritted teeth. ‘What are you going to make a video about?’
‘A wee tour of Asda,’ they say in unison.
I can’t really see that one going viral, and it sounds relatively safe, so I decide to nod and tell them I’ll help if they want.
With the boys, sometimes just the very act of my trying to get involved in their adventures was enough to convince them they didn’t really want to do them in the first place.
If that tactic doesn’t work with these two wannabe content creators, I’ll simply hope they don’t actually know how to set up a TikTok account, or if they do, that people will be kind to them.
The trolls that like to berate me on occasion better not come for my mum.
Hell hath no fury like a daughter scorned.
But the ideal outcome of all of this is that Roisin Burnside and Mrs Emily Bishop decide the influencer life is not for them. It’s bad enough having to worry about either of them falling and breaking a hip never mind them going viral. That was most definitely not on my 2024 bingo card.
But they look so delighted with themselves – like two giddy schoolgirls – and I definitely don’t want to be the middle-aged killjoy.
So, much to my own chagrin, I find myself saying, ‘As long as you behave yourselves.’ They nod solemnly in response and I’m almost – almost – convinced until they burst into laughter.
When we arrive, I am just a little terrified of what they might do but as I watch them twist and turn their phones and try to figure out how to work the camera to record a video that gets them both in frame, I decide to tell myself the lie that I’m worrying over nothing.
They can wander around and do their thing and I’ll take a seat in the café with a nice cup of coffee and only intervene in the case of catastrophe.
I’ll be a kind of hands-off but on-hand safety net.
If the worst comes to the worst, I can pretend to not know them.
Their giddiness has not abated even one bit by the time they film themselves on the travelator between the bottom and first floor – and for a moment I’m reminded that these might be two ladies in their twilight years, but essentially they are just girls trying to squeeze whatever joy they can out of life.
Just like Niamh and Laura and me. We all have that little bit inside that refuses to grow up, don’t we?
The bit that knows that joy comes from being utterly silly with your best friend.
I leave them heading towards the womenswear section, make my way to the café, and it’s not long before I have a large cup of coffee in my hand, and a very delicious-looking caramel square to go with it.
Just as I take a large bite, my phone starts to ring – the screen illuminating with Conal’s name. My heart swells as I do my best to chew and swallow the bite of gooey caramel and crunchy biscuit goodness so I can speak to him.
‘Hang on…’ I say, mid swallow, sounding like a total hallion, no doubt.
‘One moment.’ I feel a crumb catch in my throat and can’t help but cough and splutter as tears spring to my eyes.
For a second I think this might be how this ends – choking to death on a caramel square in Asda with my mother there to capture it for TikTok.
At least, I think, it will probably go viral for her. That should ease her grief.
With one last, loud cough, which comes from the very pit of my pelvic floor, making me exceptionally grateful for my Tena lights, the offending crumb shifts and shoots across the table and I gasp, sucking air into my lungs.
‘Sorry,’ I say as soon as I’m able.
‘No need to apologise,’ Conal says. ‘Are you okay? Did I just leave you breathless again?’ The amusement, now that he knows I am not expired, is there in his voice. The gentle, cheesy way he has of teasing me, while reminding me that he can, and does, quite often leave me breathless.
‘Not this time, big man,’ I say with a smile. ‘This time I was bested by a caramel square.’ I proceed to tell him where I am, and what I’m doing. And, of course, what my mother and Mrs Bishop are up to.
I’m rewarded with a hearty laugh. ‘I love your mum,’ he says.
‘She does right. Embracing all the craic she can.’ He’s right, of course.
While never boring, or overly prudish, my mother has always erred on the side of seriousness.
That is until losing the love of her life – my beloved daddy – taught her that life is too short and once it’s done, it’s never coming back.
‘You say that now, Conal. But when she becomes a full-on influencer, gets invited to do Strictly, and breaks a hip, you might not think so.’
‘I love how your brain has the full scenario already worked out,’ he says, and the thing is, with Conal, I can hear the undertones in his words. I know when he says that, he is saying ‘I love you, Becks’, and I feel warm and fuzzy inside.
‘It’s just one of my many talents,’ I reply.
‘Indeed.’ I just know he is smiling. We smile a lot.
We are in that totally sickening stage of relatively new relationship where we are just happy almost all of the time.
‘And speaking of your many talents, that’s why I was calling.
I know we haven’t seen much of each other this week, what with Clara staying with you, and your club meeting, so I just wondered if I could secure a slot in your diary for this weekend? Tonight even?’
I love that he misses me, and of course I miss him too. But I think of the haggard and tired version of me that currently exists and how I just desperately want a long shower and a good night’s sleep tonight and I know I can’t do it.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Honestly. But little Miss Clara had me up most of the night and you do not need to spend time with this version of me. I want to be well rested when I see you again.’
‘Okay. Well, tomorrow night?’ He sounds a little disappointed. I’m just about to tell him that’s absolutely fine when he drops the four-word bomb that every woman dreads. ‘We need to talk.’