Chapter 2 #2
‘Exactly. And besides, I need all the time I can get to work on my squatting game.’
‘Good point!’ Nora said. ‘We’re very out of practice, and squat toilets are challenging at our age. We’ll start doing “The Shred” again tomorrow.’
Ella knew there was no point in arguing. She’d try again in a couple of months. Maybe once she’d got a job, it’d be easier to convince them she could manage on her own. Damn, she shouldn’t have been so quick to walk out on Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
* * *
She was a little tipsy by the time she went to bed, leaving her mother and Nora still at the kitchen table, poring over the travel brochure, and reminiscing about previous adventures. Even though her energy levels had improved greatly, she still didn’t have their stamina.
Tucked up in bed with her iPad, she logged onto Facebook and wrote a quick update about her disastrous job interview.
She was touched by the sympathetic comments and emojis that flooded in, many of her online friends saying they’d been thinking of her and waiting to hear how it had gone.
It cheered her up that she had so many lovely friends in cyberspace, even as she longed for a closer kind of connection.
She chatted with a couple of her groups on WhatsApp, while simultaneously scrolling through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, catching up with her extended tribe.
She was grateful to live in a time when so many people shared their lives online.
She didn’t know how she’d have coped in the last ten years without the Internet friends who’d let her into their lives, allowing her to be part of a world beyond the confines of her room.
But grateful as she was for the community at her fingertips, sometimes it didn’t seem enough to tether her to the world, and she felt cut adrift, overwhelmed by her isolation and loneliness, and submerged in its depths where no one else could see her.
She knew how lucky she was to have her mother and Nora, and she would be eternally thankful for all the comfort and company they’d rallied round to provide when she’d become ill.
She’d have been lost without them. But there was another, deeper layer of loneliness that was always there, and she longed for a different kind of closeness – not just a romantic relationship, but friends her own age, people on the same path as her who she could share the journey with.
The trouble was, for the last ten years she hadn’t been on any path.
She’d been going nowhere, while her contemporaries had gone ahead without her until eventually they’d disappeared out of sight.
Sometimes she felt like she was so far behind now, she’d never catch up – as if she was lost in a forest so deep that no one would ever find her and she’d be alone for ever, always just making the best of things and trying to jolly herself along and convince herself she was happy.
It wasn’t just her life that had been curtailed by her illness – it was her mother’s and Nora’s too.
Nora had always been a big part of the family, her mother’s best friend as well as her sister, and a second mother to Ella.
She’d lived in New York for a while, and Malta, and as a child Ella had always looked forward to her visits when she’d sweep into their lives briefly, bringing with her an air of glamour and romance.
She’d never married, but had had lots of boyfriends and several proposals.
Her longest relationship had been with a professional gambler, who Ella remembered vaguely as a tall, sleek man with a deep mahogany tan, who seemed more like a character from a James Bond movie than someone who could exist in real life.
He and Nora had travelled the world together, living the high life from Monte Carlo to Macau, and Ella loved listening to Nora’s stories of life in other countries, and poring over her photographs of ritzy parties, beautiful clothes and fabulous houses.
When that relationship ended, Nora had finally come home to settle in Ireland. Shortly afterwards, Ella’s father died suddenly of a heart attack and Nora moved in with her and her mother, the three of them becoming a tight unit.
Ruth and Nora both loved travelling, and in the long summer holidays, they’d taken Ella on trips to Morocco or Jordan while her schoolfriends played on Mediterranean beaches.
The last trip the three of them had taken together was the year before Ella left school, when they’d hired an RV and driven across the southern States of America.
The following year, while her classmates headed off on gap-year trips across South-East Asia and Australia, and her mother and Nora went on a cruise down the Nile, Ella had gone to a Spanish resort with Julie and enjoyed the novelty of her first package holiday, soaking up the sun by day and the bar life by night.
She lay on crowded beaches reading fat novels and sleeping off hangovers.
Ruth retired early from teaching the year Ella graduated, and she and Nora planned to do the big trip across Asia they’d always dreamed of.
Then Ella fell sick, and all their plans were shelved.
* * *
Ella’s phone rang, shaking her out of her reverie. It was her friend Hazel, who’d responded to her Facebook post with a sad-face emoji and an offer to call if she wanted a chat – which Ella very much did.
‘Sorry the interview was a bust,’ she said when Ella answered.
‘It’s fine. It wouldn’t have been right for me anyway.’ She told Hazel all about Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
‘Gosh! Sounds like you dodged a bullet there all right.’
‘Yeah. Something else happened afterwards, though, that kind of… blindsided me.’ She was glad Hazel was up for a chat. It was something she hadn’t told her mother and aunt – not that they’d judge. She knew she could tell them. But she didn’t want to.
‘I was walking around town after the interview, and I saw Matthew. I passed him in the street.’
‘Matthew? You mean… Matthew Redmond?’
‘Yeah. And I automatically went to say hi… but then I stopped myself. Because I thought nah, he wouldn’t remember me. So I said nothing, just walked right by him.’
‘Okay…’ Hazel sounded confused, like she was waiting for the punchline.
‘I mean, that’s fucked up, isn’t it? We were together.’
‘For like five minutes, in first year.’
‘It was almost a month.’
‘Still—’ Hazel began.
‘A pretty intense month.’
‘You’re not still hung up on him, surely?’
‘No! God. I wasn’t “hung up on him” even then.’
‘So why are you so shook up about seeing him again?’
‘It wasn’t seeing him. It’s nothing to do with him.
It’s the fact that I could have that thought about someone I’ve had sex with!
’ It had stopped her in her tracks, literally.
She’d passed him and then caught that thought going through her head and had done a double-take.
She’d literally stood still in the street for a moment, shocked at herself.
‘I just casually thought he wouldn’t remember me. ’
‘He probably wouldn’t – it was a long time ago. But so what?’
‘So what? He’s seen me naked. He’s been inside me, for fuck’s sake! That’s seriously disturbing!’
‘It’s just modern life, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ Ella sighed despondently. Had she fallen that much out of step? She felt fed up and left behind, out of practice at sleeping with strangers and thinking outside the box. ‘I guess I have a lot of catching up to do.’