Chapter Seven
Next morning, the heat lingers like the warmth of a sunbaked stone, steady and unyielding.
I watch the RTé breakfast news as I munch on slices of cool watermelon.
The country is still dazed and confused at the persistence of this sunshine.
It’s still the lead news story. I’ve been up for hours working on Kathleen Kearney’s gold bridesmaid dress.
The top door propped open again in the useless hope that a draught, a bit of breeze, might slip through.
I listen to the gentle flapping above my head.
It’s a tiny white butterfly that has been flying around my flat all week long.
My phone beeps. It’s a text from Mia telling me she has some news for me and is excited to see me later.
We’re meeting in Rathmines at the Stella cinema for our last-Friday-of-the-month old-Hollywood cinema-dinner-date, and I’m wondering if she might have found a man for me to take to her divorce party?
I know I need to focus on the fact that this party is about her, not me, but I have my reasons!
Mia is still reinventing herself post-Michael, dealing with her guilt, regaining her own true personality.
I take another bite of melon and let the fruit melt in my mouth.
I recall calling over to her house on that eventful evening when she finally told me what I’d long suspected.
That she was desperately unhappy in her marriage to Michael Brown.
*
‘Grace, I need to tell you something.’ Mia’s voice wobbled as we sat in their immaculate kitchen, with its grey slate presses under the swaying copper pots and pans.
I’d just got off the phone with Logan – we’d almost broken up when I told him I wanted more of a commitment.
Michael was at a conference in Limerick, wouldn’t be back until late, and Mia popped the cork from a bottle of white wine.
I accepted a glass from her. ‘So, you’ve been awfully quiet lately. Talk to me? What’s going on?’
Mia shut her eyes tight. ‘It’s embarrassing. I – I’m not even sure what to say, I just know I have to say it.’ She struggled to meet my eye, her chest rising as she sat down opposite me at the table, pouring herself a large glass of red. ‘I’ve been living a lie.’
‘What lie? Just tell me,’ I told her. ‘You know you can tell me anything?’
She dropped her head into her hands for a brief moment, her long blonde curls covering her face. ‘It’s about Michael. I don’t love him anymore. I’m so unhappy. I’ve been thinking of leaving him for so long. Now I’m going to do it.’
I could feel my eyes widen. ‘W-what?’ It took me a few seconds to actually register her words. ‘That’s a big decision,’ I said softly, carefully.
She looked up at me, tears gathering in her eyes.
‘I lie to you all the time, Grace. I’m so unhappy, I’m so miserable at home.
I feel like I’m in the movie Groundhog Day.
Michael’s not a terrible husband, but I fell out of love with him years ago and our life has become so incredibly boring.
It’s monotonous and I can’t take it anymore.
I’ll lose my mind. All my Instagram cosy-home-life posts are bullshit.
All those,’ she made quotation marks with her fingers, ‘“who wants to go out when you can stay in by the fire” reels I put up and share are fake, all fake. I’m so dead inside with boredom.
I want to go out! I want to live my life! ’
‘Okay. It’s okay,’ I soothed. Secretly, I thought Michael was the most boring man I’d ever met but they had been married in their twenties, just before I met Mia.
‘It’s not okay, though . . . You see we have been trying for a baby and every time I take the test and it’s negative, well I . . .’
I could see the distress in her eyes, her face in pain. ‘Oh, you poor thing.’
‘No, quite the opposite. I heave a sigh of relief! It’s like Russian roulette.
I don’t want to see that blue line! I don’t know if I ever even want children!
Is that a terrible thing to say? I know one thing, I don’t want to get pregnant, at least, not with Michael Brown.
So last month, well I went to the nurse at my GP’s and I went back on the pill, and I haven’t told him.
See? See how bad it is?’ Mia had burst into tears.
I gave her a minute as she wiped her eyes and caught her breath, nodding in understanding. I was here to fully support my friend.
‘You see it, I know you do.’ She sniffed.
‘My life is passing me by. He doesn’t want to do anything or go anywhere; no spontaneity, no spark, no conversation anymore.
Michael is just content with the same routine every day.
Holiday in the same place every year. He can’t wait for early retirement.
I swear there is a Mia Hunter-shaped hole in that couch!
’ She attempted a snotty laugh, wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
‘Of course, I get it. As long as I’ve known you you’ve been the person who craves new experiences. I’m one hundred per cent on your side. You are right. Don’t try to plaster the marriage problems with a baby, that would be a disaster.’
‘I can’t be a mother to his kids. I can’t even stay with him, I’m dying inside, Grace.
I told him. I asked for us to do counselling, he said no way.
He says I should be grateful, we have it all, a lovely house in Dalkey, two good jobs, pensions, savings, and that I’ll feel different when we have the baby. ’
I saw the guilt in her eyes.
‘Am I to stay with a man I don’t love because I feel sorry for him?’ Mia leant back, glass in hand, her expression a mix of frustration and vulnerability.
‘No. Absolutely not,’ I’d told her honestly.
She took a gulp of her wine. ‘He wants me to give up my job and be a stay-at-home mammy. He makes more money than I could ever dream of, he make six times what I earn, in his state-of-the art finance office in the Docklands. I could, if that was what I wanted, but it isn’t and I don’t want to sound ungrateful but I feel so suffocated.
I have so much I want to do in my career in journalism, I feel like I’m only getting started.
’ She’d looked down at the table, lost for a moment in her thoughts.
‘It seems to me like you are both on very different paths,’ I said.
She stood up, threw her hands in the air. ‘Right! It’s like I’m living in a timeline that doesn’t match my own growth. I have to get out, Grace, I have to tell him tonight.’
‘Tonight?’ I gasped as I stood up, too. I put my arms on her shoulders. ‘It’s okay to feel how you feel, Mia. It doesn’t erase the love you once had for him, but you’re a grown-up now, you’re thirty-three years old, you’re a super smart woman. I’m here for you.’
She nodded. I could tell she was relieved I was on her side.
‘I can’t tell you how much that means to me.
I need you behind me so badly. This is our week, Grace.
Same thing, every week, week in, week out.
Sunday, we go out for breakfast to The Queens, he reads the paper, I people-watch in envy.
Then we go to Cornelscourt to do the weekly shop.
We come home and he does up a menu for the week that he sticks on the fridge.
Same dinners every week. Monday, chicken curry.
Tuesday, spag bol. Wednesday, fishcakes.
Thursday, steak and chips. Friday, homemade pizza – and Saturday, a Camile takeaway and a bottle of wine.
’ She pulled at the neck of her top as though she couldn’t breathe.
‘All meals on the couch in front of the TV. And then there is his constant flicking, channel after channel after channel. He asks me, what about this? I always say the same thing, I don’t care, ’cause I don’t.
He doesn’t put sex on the menu, but that occurs on a Sunday night, after his bath; well, it used to, but I can’t anymore.
It’s why I’ve let myself go, hoping to turn him off and I think I have a little.
‘Jesus, Mia.’ I couldn’t think of anything more to say.
‘I feel like such a bitch,’ Mia said. ‘But it’s over.’
I remained quiet.
Suddenly my problems with Logan seemed utterly infantile and pathetic in comparison. I was ashamed of myself and my blindness.
‘You are the furthest thing from a bitch. You are incredibly loving and patient. This is the first step, telling me. I’m here for you.
I love you so much. I’m just sorry I was so disgustingly self-involved with my own relationship I didn’t notice what you were going through.
I mean, we go to the Stella every month, I should have seen your unhappiness. I’m mortified.’
‘You couldn’t have known, I lied. I hid it well. Logan’s not the only good actor in the Hunter household.’ She made a half attempt at jazz hands.
As I lifted the bottle of wine and dried the underneath on a napkin, the front door opened.
Mia stood up slowly, smoothed down her skirt. ‘Right on time. He’s home. It’s why I need you here. I can’t do this without you.’
I jumped up. ‘W-what? Do what?’ My words came on a loud gasp.
‘I told you. I’m telling him tonight. I’m telling him right now.’
I was struck dumb in shock.
*