Chapter Nine This Woman’s Work
Chapter Nine: This Woman’s Work
Mel was having coffee with Aisling. Well, to be more accurate, Mel was having coffee and Aisling was there, talking at her.
“The absolute gall,” she’d been saying in that affected voice of hers.
Mel was just tuning back in, having gotten distracted by a dog taking a shit on the sidewalk outside the cafe, which she found infinitely more interesting than her brother’s love life.
“Telling me that I’m pathetic! If it isn’t the pot calling the kettle black.
” She took an angry sip of her cappuccino, then tried to suppress a distasteful wrinkling of her nose.
She drank cappuccinos because she felt they made her seem more cosmopolitan, despite the fact that she couldn’t stand the taste of coffee.
“Anyway,” she went on. “I can’t see how it is he’s even pulling girls, what with the way he is. Sure, he’s good looking enough and charming when he wants to be, but he has about as much substance as candy floss, and just as bad for you. I’m glad I did away with him.”
“Right,” Mel said flatly. It was the first thing she’d said in ten minutes.
“Honestly. Good riddance, I say. If I never see his face again it’ll be too soon. We’re well and truly over this time. For good.”
“Great.” Mel checked her watch and lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one she’d just finished.
“If he ever darkens my doorstep again, I’ll send him packing. He’s not the only sparkly fish in the sea. I’ll have myself a new man this time next week and where will he be? Sat in his living room with that tall freak mate of his, braiding each other’s hair.”
“So why the fuck are you telling me this?” Mel’s patience had worn razor thin.
Aisling blinked owlishly at her from behind a curtain of smoke. A faint pink blush momentarily rose prettily to her cheeks. “I’ll get to the point then. You see, I was rather hoping you could help me.”
“Do what? Keep Jules away from you? Sorted. He tries to go back to ya, I’ll put his eye out with his straightening iron. Anything else I can do you for?”
“Well, that wasn’t quite what I had in mind…” She tucked a strand of rich, chocolate coloured hair behind her reddening ear. “I was hoping you could find out if he really is sleeping around.”
“I thought you said he cheated on you.”
“He did! Or, well…” she amended, biting her rosy lip. “I’m nearly entirely sure he did. I just don’t have any real proof. And I know I made the right choice chucking him -- I’m certain of it, in fact -- I just want to know the choice was based on all of the correct information, as it were.”
Mel pinched the bridge of her nose under her glasses.
She swore to God that Julian was going to be the death of her.
She was younger than him by a whole four years, and yet she had been taking care of him and cleaning up his messes since she’d been old enough to walk.
When their mum had gone out, she would leave Mel in charge of him.
‘Don’t let him burn down the house,’ she’d say, while Julian would be in the background dancing around with a fistful of lit matches.
Mel was still keeping him from burning down the metaphorical house to this very day.
And he was still off dancing with matches.
It’s not that he meant any harm by it, mind.
In fact, if he knew how much harm he caused himself and those around him, he’d probably do his hardest to stop.
But he didn’t know. He couldn’t understand complicated concepts like that.
Instead, he was just living life the only way he knew how -- recklessly, happily, and hedonistically.
You could hardly fault someone for what was in their nature.
But you could fault someone for making the conscious choice to keep tying themselves to him, again and again, when all evidence suggested they should leg it as far and fast as possible.
“I don’t get you,” Mel said after a significant pause. “You and Jules both. All the time you’ve been together, you’ve done nothing but make each other miserable. But you keep going back, like you’re magnets or something that keep getting pulled back together.”
“I’m not going back now,” said Aisling, and sniffed indignantly.
“You are, or you wouldn’t be having me looking into his shit.
You’re just looking for a reason to go back, begging for one.
It’s mental. What’s Julian got? A magic cock or something?
If any bloke treated me the way he’s treated you -- or fuck, if I’d treated any bloke the way you’ve treated him -- there’d be restraining orders out and everything.
Why do you want him back? Tell me the truth. ”
Aisling’s fingers, with their sloppily painted blue nails, reached out and plucked a cigarette from Mel’s pack. She lit it and blew out a lengthy plume of smoke towards the cafe’s ceiling. As she looked up, Mel noticed her eyes were glistening.
“We’re all we’ve got. Me and him. You know when you’re little, and you ask your mum to put up some hideous wallpaper in your bedroom?
Like, with pink flowers or something? You love it so much when you’re a kid, then you take it for granted for years and years.
Until one day you look at it and you think to yourself ‘I really ought to take that down. I’m not a kid anymore.
I should have grownup wallpaper, or paint in a respectable shade like mauve or something.
’ You promise yourself you’re going to take it down one day.
You lie in bed some nights, staring at it, telling yourself that tomorrow’s the day, you’re finally going to tear the damned thing down.
But then you get up, you go to work, and when you get back at the end of the day you’re just too knackered to do anything about it.
And even, in a way, you’re a little grateful.
It’s always been there, hasn’t it? Your eyes are used to it.
Would it really be home without it? Maybe you should just leave it up, after all.
It isn’t hurting anybody, and, when you really think about it, it’s not as bad as all that.
You like it, even, now that you think about it.
Because you don’t really deserve a posh room with clean, accented lines like you’ve seen in magazines.
That’s for people who don’t work temp jobs or live at home with their parents or do their own perm because they can’t afford the hairdresser’s.
You have the wallpaper you deserve. And that wallpaper -- hideous pink roses that really aren’t so bad if you think about it -- well, it deserves you, too. ”
She stubbed out her barely smoked cigarette and dabbed at her cheeks with a napkin. It came away streaky with her foundation.
Mel could empathise with her. Not sympathise -- Mel knew she was the tits and she deserved the absolute best life had to offer.
But she could see how a working-class girl from South London and a working-class boy from South London, both artistic and pretty and misunderstood, might meet at art college and find in each other a kindred spirit -- and how they might cock it all up.
Of course, they’d have no obvious solution to the issue.
Mel could be that solution. Right now, she was the puppeteer with all the strings in her hands.
She only had to distort the facts ever so slightly (hell, she might not even have to do that much -- knowing her brother, it was entirely possible he really did cheat on her) and voilà: two puppets spinning away from each other, forever disentangled.
She took a sip of her black, sugarless coffee and set the cup down on the saucer with a grating click of porcelain on porcelain. “All right,” she said. “I’ll take a look. But I’m not promising anything.”
“Oh, thank you, Mel,” Aisling gushed, taking Mel’s hands into her own. “I’m ever so grateful. Honestly. Anything you need, I’m your man.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Mel said, extricating her hands. “You don’t even know if I’m going to find anything.”
“It doesn’t matter. Just knowing that you’re willing to help me out is enough.”
Christ on toast. If Aisling kept carrying on like that, she was going to be sick all over the shop.
“Look, I just think it’s a shame that when two women get together it’s just to talk about a man.”
“I suppose it is a bit cliché, isn’t it?” Aisling conceded. “But what would we talk about if not men?”
“I dunno. Pens?”
“Pens?”
“Turkish Delights? Whatever. I don’t know what women like. I don’t know any.”
Mel finished her coffee and snuffed out her cigarette in the small butt molehill that had formed in the ashtray. She’d had enough girl-talk for one day.