Chapter 2
2
‘YE WOULDN’T BE LONG GETTIN’ FROSTBIT’
It may only have been three or four minutes since I discovered the door closed behind me, but it feels a lot longer. I have tried battering on the door to attract the attention of my classmates, but I know it’s likely pointless. They are down a hall and behind a fire door. They won’t hear my pathetic thuds. Especially not as they lie on their backs listening to their guided meditation over the soft sounds of some plinky-plonky music – the kind you only hear in spas or classes which require you to move as if you’re playing a one-woman game of Twister with yourself.
I could try phoning Niamh but I know I’d likely be on a hiding to nothing with that. Niamh does not believe in ever having her phone on anything but silent. Especially not when she is having time out from her work or her family.
‘There is nothing so important it can’t wait a bit,’ she often says. ‘I mean even if someone is dead, my answering the phone isn’t going to undead them, is it?’
She has a point.
As my toes start to turn blue and my poor frozen hands start to turn purple, I console myself with the knowledge that this cannot go on much longer.
The relaxing meditation bit comes just before the ‘Namaste’ bit, which preludes the drinking from water bottles and smiling smugly at all your fellow classmates, proud that you have survived the ordeal. Not long after that, they will all start to leave and all being well they will find me still alive and not frozen to death, my nipples standing proudly to attention in the bitter night air.
Crossing my arms in front of my chest and plunging my hands into my armpits in a bid to preserve body heat, I contemplate ordering myself a pizza as soon as I get home and undoing what little good I have just done for my body during the last hour.
At least, I think, I could share it with Adam, who has yet to return to his beloved Manchester after the Christmas holidays, while he tries to wrap his head around the news that his girlfriend is pregnant.
It’s fair to say that he is very much on an emotional rollercoaster right now and I never quite know what version of Adam I’m going to come home to. When I’d left to come to yoga, he had been sitting on his bed, strumming tunelessly on his guitar and talking to our beloved pet, Daniel the Spaniel.
He has learned, just as I did over the past few years, that Daniel is a trusty confidante. He never spreads gossip, will listen for hours as long as you scratch his belly or behind his ears, and almost never looks at you with judgement in his eyes. If you can handle the noxious aroma of his gassy emissions, he is actually a pretty great companion to have around.
I’m lost in a little jig trying to stave off the impending frostbite when I hear the door open behind me and turn to see a few of the young, more lithe, members of the group stare at me as if I’ve lost the run of my senses.
‘If you’re done gawping, any chance I could get past you?’ I say, as cheerily as my chattering teeth will allow. They nod a yes in unison, and step backwards. Then, just like Moses parting the Red Sea, my frozen form seems to prompt a parting of the fit and healthy as I walk down the hall, arms crossed to protect the modesty of my still-erect nipples, so I can retrieve my belongings and warm up before hypothermia kicks in.
‘Where on earth did you go?’ Niamh asks as I walk back into the room. She is standing – her shoes, oversized hoodie and jacket already on – next to my discarded trainers. ‘You were there before I closed my eyes and then when we sat up you were gone. I hadn’t a clue what you were at!’ She sounds cross, but I know my friend well enough to know that in Niamh-land cross is often her way of hiding her worry.
‘My phone,’ I say. ‘You must’ve heard it. That “Mum, Mummy, Mum” thing?’
‘That was you?’ she asks.
‘Saul has been at my settings again,’ I say, and she nods her head in a ‘that explains it’ gesture.
‘Is everything okay with him? Has he lost his left shoe again? Or remembered the time he hid a fiver of his communion money all those years ago and wants you to go and look if it’s still there?’ she asks. These are, for the record, both things Saul has actually phoned me about in recent times.
‘The extractor fan in his kitchen is kaput,’ I say. ‘And he is in desperate need of a bacon sandwich.’
‘Have you scrambled the private jet yet?’ she asks with a cheeky smile. ‘This seems like a category-one emergency.’
Niamh is perhaps the only person in the world who can make jokes about my children or call out their occasional fecklessness without causing me great offence. Niamh gets it – not just because she is a mother to four herself – but because she has been by my side through every step of my parenting journey (boke at the word ‘journey’ – overused as it is). She has witnessed every high point, low point and all in between over the years, and I know that when she criticises the boys she does it ultimately from a place of great affection and from a place of great support for me and my occasionally frazzled nerves.
I smile back. ‘I sent him money to order a pizza and left instructions for him to contact the landlord in the morning. It was enough to settle him a bit. Only back in England a few days and the crises are already flowing.’
‘Thank God for pizza,’ she says as I tie the laces on my trainers, glad to be able to feel my toes again. ‘I suppose it must be strange for him, Adam not being there.’
And she’s right. Even though they are like chalk and cheese when it comes to their personalities, my boys tend to rub along in a nice little codependent manner when they are away from home. Adam is the sensible-headed one who probably knows how to fix a wonky fuse in an extractor fan but can take life a little too seriously and have trouble letting himself go. Saul is the antithesis to this – and the one who will drag his brother down to the Student Union, or up on stage for a karaoke performance of ‘Wonderwall’ and make sure life has its fun elements. They are the yin to each other’s yang in that regard, and neither of them functions quite as well without the other.
‘I think it is. And I think it’s strange for Adam too.’
‘Yeah,’ Niamh says. ‘Things are a bit arseways at the moment.’
She doesn’t need to explain. I know what she means already. It’s a strange time for her eldest, Jodie, too. Although both of our children (now adults) have impressed us with their mature approach to things, there’s no escaping the, frankly, shite timing of it all. Their relationship has only moved from the friend zone to the romance zone over the past few months. This should still be the super-fun-can’t-keep-their-hands-off-each-other stage – which presumably it was for a time, given this unexpected pregnancy.
The memory of Niamh arriving at my door, Laura by her side for moral support, and a pregnancy test in her hand is still embedded firmly in my memory. She regrets telling me in that way now. Wishes she had given Jodie and Adam a chance to work out their feelings before coming to us with the news themselves. But, as I always say, we can only do the best we can with the information we have at the time. At that time, Niamh was in possession of just enough information to freak herself the fuck out and so, of course, it was understandable she would turn to her best friends for support.
Now it is up to us to support our adult children in whatever way they need. For Niamh, that has meant holding Jodie’s hair back while she pukes several times a day, and often with little warning.
For me, it has meant assuring Adam that whatever decision he and Jodie make, he will have my full and unequivocal support and that my newfound incontrovertible knowledge that he has had sex has not lessened my opinion of him in any fashion whatsoever. After all, I have always known it was going to happen some day, even if I could’ve happily lived out my years not knowing it for certain.
‘They’ll be okay though,’ I say, and I’m not sure if it’s a statement or a question. Maybe it’s a bit of both.
‘They will,’ says Niamh. ‘And it’s not the worst news that could come to our doors.’
We have been reminding ourselves of this a lot. It’s not an illness, or an addiction. It’s not the revelation that they are part of some gangland criminal cartel. It’s a baby. Chances are if we had gotten this news ten years, or even five years, from now it would be a cause for celebration. But it is what it is and it’s our job to guide our nineteen- and twenty-year-old offspring through the coming months.
It’s also our job to try and remain sane while doing so and, as Laura reminded me via WhatsApp earlier, it’s my job not to slide into old habits of focusing on supporting everyone else and not pushing forward with my own plans to build a life for myself that sixteen-year-old me would be proud of.
In fact, Laura has been adamant that even with this unfurling domestic drama I power on with my mission to make good on the promises I made my younger self, which I rediscovered when I uncovered the time capsule we made as teenagers.
Laura will not allow me to forsake my plans to overhaul my career, see more of the world and learn to love the life I lead and the body I lead it in. The only area she has kept clear of getting involved in is with my budding – now stalled – relationship with Conal. Her brother. It’s not, she says, that she doesn’t care – more that she can’t bring herself to openly encourage me to have sexual relations with someone who made an art form of directing his farts in her direction when he was a child.
As Niamh and I leave the community centre and reach our cars, we give each other a hug. ‘We’ll be okay too,’ I tell her. ‘I mean, I’m not sure I’ll be able to move tomorrow without considerable effort and a few choice swear words but overall, we’ll be okay.’
‘You just need to get used to the moves and then, honest, you’ll find it a great stress reliever. I feel much better able to go back and deal with Paul after this.’ I hug her tightly, because while Niamh and I are doing our best to support our children, Paul is very much struggling with the news, and as a result there have been some shockwaves in their usually quite wonderful relationship.
‘He still being…’ I trail off, trying to think of a suitable way to describe how Paul is behaving without being truly offensive.
‘A dick?’ Niamh says. ‘Yeah. But you know the craic. He’s my dick, etc. We’ll get through it.’ She shrugs as she gets into her car, leaving me wondering how bad things might actually be between them.