Dominic
In the week after the Orla incident, I find myself feeling oddly miserable.
Not just the kind of usual worried, depressed feeling I get when someone I went to school with wins an award or gets promoted, but something heavier, a proper mard.
I think it might be guilt. I’ve messaged her a load of times asking if she’s okay, if she wants to talk, all that stuff, and she’s not replied.
She doesn’t owe me a reply, obviously, but I can’t help feeling like an utter shit.
Yeah, I was intensely clear about what I had to offer when we started talking but she’s not exactly the first person to think that what someone says and what they feel might not match up.
Anyway, it’s Saturday morning, almost a week after Orla’s premature departure, and adding to my sense that the world is a bad place is the fact that I’ve got to go to the other side of London for my nephew’s birthday party.
River (not my name suggestion) is turning two, which means he doesn’t know what a birthday party is or what a birthday is or what the passing of time is.
But Georgie, my sister, has been making a balloon arch for an entire week and made it very clear that this event was not optional.
I set an alarm for early because I’m not going to be the cliché child-free brother who arrives late and forgets to bring a present, and I’m in the car before I’d usually even be hitting snooze.
When I arrive at the party Georgie opens the front door and then goes back into the Victorian terrace without saying hello.
‘Mini pittas are burning!’ she shouts, disappearing.
I follow her down the hall and into the open-plan kitchen and living room.
She’s got AstroTurf in the garden and bifold doors that everyone who has kids is obliged to have (as an architect, I’m well aware).
It’s a nice house, like it’s the kind of house that people work really hard to have, but my god it makes me even more sure that I can’t do any of this.
‘Hello, love,’ my mum says, putting her arms around my neck. She looks older than she did last time I saw her, a few months ago, which makes me feel deeply guilty. ‘Did you bring a present?’ she asks.
Obviously I brought a present. I point at the box of rainbow stacking cups I’ve placed by the door.
‘Wow,’ Mum says, like I’ve brought an actual unicorn with me. ‘Who wrapped that?’
‘I did!’ I say, sounding like a whiny little boy. Why is it so surprising that I, a thirty-four-year-old man, might own a roll of wrapping paper and scissors? ‘Where’s Dad?’
She points to the garden where Dad and Georgie’s husband, hilariously named George, are trying to put up a banner reading This Is My Second Rodeo. I look at it, bemused.
‘No,’ Mum says. ‘Me neither.’
‘Sorry,’ Georgie says, looking harassed. She comes back into the kitchen with her behemoth toddler, my nephew, on her hip in a position that is presumably turning her spine into a sort of ‘S’ shape. ‘There’s just such a lot to get done.’
I take River and throw him up and down in the air for a bit, working out what kind of weight I’m lifting and whether I should start drinking creatine, or at least find out what creatine is, while Georgie arranges different chopped-up fruits into the shape of a rainbow and then dabs ‘yogurt clouds’ on the ends.
Eventually her friends start arriving, complete with other much smaller toddlers, and we’re all sent outside into their garden, which looks a lot like the Big Brother garden from the noughties because of the previously mentioned AstroTurf.
I realise after half an hour that driving here was a mistake because Georgie has stacked the garden with bottles of booze. I want to ask if this is normal for a kids’ party taking place in the middle of the morning but that’d probably sound judgmental.
‘Cheers!’ shouts one of her friends, taking the cork out of a bottle.
‘Prosecco o’clock!’ says another extremely similar-looking woman.
One of their husbands sidles up to me, sitting next to me on the sun-drenched bench. ‘I’m Ollie,’ he says.
‘Dom,’ I reply.
‘Which one’s yours?’
I point at Georgie. He looks confused. ‘That’s my sister,’ I explain.
‘Oh!’ The realisation dawns on him. ‘No kids?’
‘No kids.’
‘And you’re spending your Saturday doing this?’
‘I mean, he is my nephew.’
‘You must be absolutely hanging,’ he says, weirdly excited by the idea. ‘Big night last night?’
Last night I watched The Red Shoes, a 1948 film about a pair of haunted ballet shoes, and ate an entire bag of frozen gyoza.
‘No,’ I say, bemused. ‘I’m fine.’
Over the course of the morning, about six other people discover that I’m the child-free brother and then make a comment about how hungover I must be.
Eventually, once I’ve forgotten absolutely everyone’s names, the kids start screaming and hurling food at each other, then George and Georgie give everyone a party bag and send them on their merry way.
My mum and dad go home, Mum driving because Dad might fall asleep at the wheel (this has never happened and there’s no suggestion that it would ever happen but Mum likes to worry about it anyway).
I pick up Paw Patrol plates and napkins from the garden floor, and shove them into a bin bag.
Georgie comes back from putting River down for what sounded like a very intensely resisted nap.
‘Sorry,’ she says, picking up what I think may be someone else’s paper cup of Prosecco. ‘I’ve barely talked to you.’
‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘You had your public to deal with. It was a great party.’
‘It was a second birthday party, Dom. It was boring as shit, you don’t need to be sarcastic.’
‘I wasn’t being sarcastic!’ I argue.
‘Are you hungover?’
‘Why does everyone keep asking me that?’
‘You just look a bit. . . off.’
Someone’s untouched piece of cake is sitting on a plate on the garden wall, so I decide to adopt it. I peel the white icing off the top, relishing how it tastes exactly the same as it did when we were kids.
‘I’m fine,’ I say, my teeth slightly sticking together. ‘Just had a shit week.’
‘Why?’
I shrug. ‘Romantic stuff.’
She looks surprised, which is fair because I don’t give much away to any of my family when it comes to dating. ‘Like what?’
‘I was seeing this girl and it was supposed to be casual. We got on really well. She lives in Dublin. We’ve had a kind of regular-casual thing going for a while. But then she got feelings for me, and I ended up really hurting her, and she won’t return my calls and I feel like a piece of shit.’
Georgie rolls her eyes. ‘Where did you meet her?’
‘A dating app.’
‘Which one?’
I don’t think Georgie knows anything about dating apps, but I tell her anyway.
‘Dom!’ she says. ‘You tit. That’s for people who are dating dating. Like husband, marriage, babies dating.’
I give her a perplexed look because Georgie is married with a two-year-old; this isn’t her world.
‘I’m not dead,’ she retorts. ‘I read stuff, I have friends, I know stuff. If you’re dating to find someone who actually doesn’t want a commitment, you need to go on Tangl.’
It is fairly embarrassing that Georgie, married, knows more about this than I do, so I don’t admit that I have no idea what she’s talking about.
‘Good idea,’ I say, nodding along. ‘Yeah. Okay, that’s a plan.’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘Now, I love you but please go home. I’m supposed to sleep when the baby sleeps.’
‘He’s two.’
Georgie points towards the gate. ‘Out.’