Chapter 16
16
I fell into a deep sleep, only to be woken at some ungodly hour by cascades of bottles being thrown into the bin beneath my window. Oh, please . I grabbed my phone to see the time—twenty past twelve. I’d been asleep for a mere forty minutes.
Yanking back the curtain, the apologetic face of Emilien was looking up. “Sorry,” he called. “I tried to do it quietly.”
“Ah-haha.” I faked an absence of fury, as etiquette insisted. “No bother at all. I was awake anyway…”
Now I really was awake. Long after the bottle-smashing ceased, I lay staring at nothing, unable to resist all my dark truths.
Relocating to Ireland had seemed like a great idea until I’d actually got here. Everyone else my age seemed anchored by proof of their time on this earth: long marriages; children, even grandchildren; homes with attic conversions; pension plans. They had good neighbors, a shared postman, a street WhatsApp group. They’d paid off their mortgages, could recommend bakers for special birthday cakes, and had the comfort of knowing their place in the world.
I’d spent my life terrified of being trapped; suddenly I saw the value in stopping and growing roots. It was too late now. I’d achieved nothing, accumulated nothing. As insubstantial as a wisp, I could blow away and land anywhere.
As the night ticked by, my head remained defiantly active—but I would not check the time! It was hard to know if this was menopausal insomnia or mid-life-crisis insomnia and perhaps, when the outcome was the same, it didn’t matter. But too many of the symptoms that had plagued me before I’d started HRT were back—not just insomnia, but night sweats, brain fog and bouts of rage.
To soothe myself, I thought about how great life would be when Courtney came good with a sympathetic doctor and I was back on the meds again. Eventually I got back to sleep. It was probably no surprise I dreamed about Jacqui.
“A cailíní, this is Jacqui Staniforth,” Sister Xavier said.
Twenty fourteen-year-olds presented blank faces to the super-tall newcomer.
“Who’s this freak?” Hazel Dwyer said, loudly enough to generate covert sniggers.
My heart hurt for the new arrival. But she smiled, revealing a mouthful of retainers. “Hi.”
As one body, my classmates recoiled. Confidence? No! New arrivals had to act painfully shy, blooming into their best self only under the warm attention of the class stars. Barging right in, already socialized, broke all the rules.
“Sit there.” Sister Xavier pointed to the empty place beside poor Hilary Dole. Thanks to her port-wine birthmark, Hilary was invisible to the popular girls. Today I was beside Emilia Romano, who was also shunned because she “smells of chips.”
As Jacqui passed my desk, she caught my gaze, cut her eyes to Hazel Dwyer, then flashed a gleeful grin which said, Hazel Dwyer is a dope and so are her mean-girl mates.
In that instant, my life changed. This new girl was fearless—and so nice . Look at her there, already talking with Hilary!
Although I wasn’t lumped in with Hilary and Emilia, I existed on the fringes, very much a C-lister. Being inconspicuous was my superpower: if no one noticed me, no one could come for me. It helped that I was neither brainy nor hilariously stupid.
Low-level loneliness was my constant companion but I didn’t want to belong with the bitches, who shrieked about clean-cut Jason Donovan or over-muscled David Hasselhoff. Beautiful, moody River Phoenix was my obsession. I kept that to myself though after Juliet Blaney said he looked like he never washed his hair; the last thing I wanted was drama—I got enough of that at home. A noisy household, my four sisters and Mum loved a good argument. Or a bad argument. Any kind of argument, really.
Wishing for an invisibility cloak, I hid away in books, music and movies, filling in time until I was old enough to escape—from school, home and Ireland.
But that September morning I sensed life was about to improve. Jacqui Staniforth was as tall as I was short, as friendly as I was quiet, but, one oddball calling to another, singing our silent weirdo song, we’d found kindred spirits.
Within days, we were spending every afternoon at my house, where we lay on my bed and discovered we felt the same about everything. We’d both read Animal Farm and Brave New World and loved Terence Trent D’Arby, Kate Bush and the Go-Betweens. Beetlejuice was her favorite movie but she also loved Heathers (my favorite) and her dream man was Christian Slater.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” she told me. “It’s those girls. They’re so fucking narrow-minded.” She looked around anxiously. “Is it okay to swear?”
“In this house? It’s practically a rule.”
“Seriously? Okay. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Then we screamed with laughter.
“All they want is to get some crappy job, get married and be stuck here in Ireland forever, paying their mortgage on their crappy house.”
“My worst nightmare,” I said. “As soon as I can, I’m going to escape.”
Over the weeks and months, Jacqui and I planned our perfect futures. Mine involved living on a houseboat in Amsterdam. “It’s really cute. Everything is small but neat. There’s a special place to stow everything. After that I want to live on a small Greek island. I’ll sunbathe all day and work in a bar at night.”
“Me too!” Jacqui said. “And I want a camper van—”
“—a VW one!” I gasped. “Light blue. Can I go halves?”
“Yes! Please! We’ll hit the road. We meet these hunks in Italy, they’ll fall in love with us, but we keep going—”
“No!”
“There’ll be more boys. Tons of them!”
“Okay. We’ll drive to Egypt. And Morocco. We’ll have adventures, go to fancy weddings and stay in huge castles. Everyone will love us and give us bread and marzipan. Tell me about the boys we meet.”
“My ones look like Christian Slater and yours are the image of River.”
I shrieked with delight. “So we’ll never fall out over a boy!”
“Never.” Solemnly she said, “And everywhere we go we’ll leave a trail of broken hearts.”
“No babies, though.” What I wanted from adult life was freedom to up and off from any stressy situation. You couldn’t do that if you had children.
“No babies,” Jacqui agreed. “Even though men will be dueling over us!”
In real life, though, we didn’t fare so well. “We’re nearly fifteen.” Jacqui was so anxious. “We really should be getting some action.”
The local boys’ school offered a motley selection, of which only one or two were worthy of our love. I ate my heart out over a long-haired waif called Cuan Hartigan who never even looked in my direction while Jacqui decided she was mad about a hulking six-footer called Rozzer. From afar we stared, sighed and—after I’d found a well-thumbed copy of 30 Spells to Win Love in the Oxfam shop—dabbled in witchcraft.
Our every free moment was spent cross-legged on my bedroom floor, casting spells left, right and center, even when it was impossible to locate the precise ingredients: a teaspoon of Schwartz dried herbs had to stand in for a bouquet of fresh rosemary; four drops of the Mazola oil Mum used to fry chips was substituted for the mysterious-sounding cinnamon oil.
We lit candles; burnt brown string even though the spell specified red yarn; made a vague stab at pointing a compass towards Rozzer’s house, then Cuan’s; wrote our wishes on pieces of paper and, with great reverence, tapped each other on the head with Mum’s wooden spoon (as close as we could get to a wand), as we solemnly intoned “Alakazam.”
Then, horrors! Word came down via—the cruelest cut!—Cuan Hartigan that Rozzer liked me .
Even though Rozzer couldn’t have known that Jacqui fancied him, I was furious. “You’re fabulous and I’d only come up to his knee. Maybe we pointed the compass in the wrong direction?”
“It’s my fault because I’m horrific.” Jacqui studied herself in her full-length mirror. “ Why am I so tall?”
“You’re beautiful. Like Geena Davis. I’m horrific. I look like I’m eleven . I’m invisible to Cuan Hartigan.”
“He’s a fool. You could be Winona Ryder’s sister!”
We were each other’s cheerleaders, even though we both suspected we were whistling in the dark.
Which was confirmed one day in the changing rooms after netball with Juliet Blaney bemoaning the size of her thighs. “How does Jacqui Staniforth do it? She eats loads but she’s so thin. She could be a model.”
“She could never be a model.” Hazel Dwyer spoke with pompous authority. “She doesn’t have the face for it.”
“Yes, she does!” Loyalty made me reckless. “Once her teeth are fixed, she’ll be gorgeous.”
“She couldn’t go down a catwalk,” Hazel said. “Not with those knees!”
That provoked howls of laughter. The absolute bitches. There was something loose-looking about Jacqui’s knees and elbows, as though the joints had been unscrewed slightly.
“She’ll grow out of it,” I said. “But will you grow out of being bitches?”
I marched away, shaking at my nerve. When word reached Jacqui of my steadfastness (from Stacy Ryan, pretending to be nice) she floated the idea of casting a “ slightly evil” spell on them. But even though our success rate so far was zero, we decided—feeling very virtuous—not to harness our powers for bad.
After just four terms, Jacqui moved to England, because of her dad’s job. Her parting gift was a deck of tarot cards, which I remained devoted to for well over a decade.
Naturally, after her departure, there came a flurry of taunts about having no friends. Then, surprisingly, I was left in peace.
Lonelier than I had been before, though. For about a year Jacqui and I rang each other whenever our parents were out, then lied through our teeth when the huge phone bills came in. But inevitably she made new friends and drifted away. They were lucky to have her, whoever they were.
During my responsibility-free twenties, I’d often drifted back to Ireland but returning forever when Shane and I broke up was a different story. Clearly, my life was over. But I had it all wrong. For starters, Jacqui was back in Dublin!
Like me, she’d avoided any kind of “career,” but had fallen into a dream job as VIP concierge in a luxury hotel. Her brief was wide-ranging but vague. Sometimes she did mundane stuff, such as organizing late-night cosmetic dentistry. (You’d be amazed how often that was requested.) But frequently she had to socialize with the VIPs. Well, that’s how it was described—“socializing”—but the real reason for her presence was to customize reality for them, ensuring that the ice was the correct coldness, the full moon wasn’t too bright, etc.
“I haven’t a single qualification,” she told me. “I’ve no idea how this happened.”
“Because you’re amazing.” I was still mad about her. “You’re friendly, you’re funny, you’re effective. You’re all the good things.”
“So are you,” she said. “What’ll you do now?”
Well! Encouraged by Margaret’s husband Garv, I went to college to do Public Relations. The moment I got my diploma, I was hired by a company which repped a cosmetic brand. Honesty compels me to admit that both the company and the brand were drab and sad—no wonder it had been so easy to get the job.
However, it gave me a sense of how great things could be—given the right circumstances. And the right location…New York was in my sights. My short visit there had made quite the impression but being with Mum, Dad and Helen meant my wings had been somewhat clipped. There was a lot—oh, an awful lot—I still wanted to do. “C’mon, Jacqui, let’s move to New York.”
“New York?” She thought about it for half a second. “Okay!”