Kitabı oxu: «Always and Forever»

CHAPTER ONE

January, a year and a half later.

Mel Redmond dumped her fake Italian leather briefcase onto the cubicle floor, pushed the loo seat down with a loud clang, sat on it and began trying to rip the cellophane from the packet of ten-denier barely blacks. Haste made her clumsy. Damn packet. Was everything childproof?

Finally, the packet yielded and the tights unfolded in a long, expensively silky skein. The convenience store beside Lorimar Health Insurance was out of black and barely black sheers – ridiculous really, given that the store was bang in the centre of Dublin’s office-land – so Mel had had to rush to the upmarket boutique beside the bank and shell out a whopping €16 for a pair. She would get a ladder in her tights on a day when the firm’s chief executive was addressing the troops.

Years in public relations had taught Mel one of the central tenets of the working woman: look great and people notice you; look sloppy and they notice the sloppy part, whether it was smudged eyeliner, chipped nail polish or omigod, look at her roots!

Anyway, Hilary, head of Lorimar’s publicity and marketing departments and Mel’s boss, would probably turn chalk white under her Elizabeth Arden foundation if Mel committed the crime of turning up at the meeting with ripped tights.

Mel joked that Hilary was the person she wanted to be when she grew up: always organised, as opposed to doing her best to look organised, and with an emergency supply of headache tablets, tights and perfume in her briefcase, which was real Italian leather.

Mel’s fake one contained her own emergency supplies of half a chocolate bar, a tampon with the plastic ripped off, one fluffy paracetamol, several uncapped pens and a tiny toddler box of raisins so desiccated they now resembled something from Tutankhamen’s tomb. Raisins were great for snacks, according to the toddler-feeding bibles, but Mel had discovered that chocolate buttons were far better for warding off tantrums in the supermarket at home in Carrickwell.

‘Score another black mark for being a terrible mother,’ Mel liked to joke to her colleague in marketing, Vanessa. They joked a lot about being bad mothers although they’d have killed anyone who’d actually called them such.

When you were a working mum, you had to joke about the very thing you were afraid of, Mel said. Her life was dedicated to making sure that two-and-a-half-year-old Carrie and four-year-old Sarah didn’t suffer because she went out to work. If she could possibly help it, nobody would ever be able to describe Mel Redmond as lacking in anything she did.

She loved her job at Lorimar, was highly focused and had once vowed to be one of the company’s publicity directors by the time she was forty.

Two children had changed all of that. Or perhaps Mel had changed as a result of having two children. Like the chicken and the egg, she was never quite sure which had come first.

The upshot was that she was now forty, the publicity directorship was a goal that had moved further away instead of closer, and she was struggling to keep all the balls in the air. As motherhood made her boobs drop, it made her ambition slide as well.

‘When I grow up, I want to be a business lady with an office and a briefcase,’ the eleven-year-old Mel had written in a school essay.

‘Aren’t you the clever girl?’ her dad had said when she came home with the essay prize. ‘Look at this,’ he told the rest of his family proudly at the next big get-together, holding up the copy book filled with Mel’s neat, sloping writing. ‘She’s a chip off the old block, our little Melanie. Brains to burn.’

Mel’s dad would have gone to university except that there hadn’t been enough money. It was a great joy to him to see his daughter’s potential.

‘Don’t you want to get married at all?’ asked Mel’s grandmother in surprise. ‘If you get married you can have a lovely home, with babies, and be very happy.’

Mel, who liked the parts of history lessons where girls got to fight instead of stay home and mind the house, simply asked: ‘Why?’

Her father still thought it was hilarious, and regularly recounted the story of how his Melanie, even as a child, had her heart set on a career.

Mel loved him for being so proud of her, but she’d grown to hate that story. As a kid, she’d assumed that being smart meant you could have it all. She knew better now.

These days she had two jobs, motherhood and career, and even if everyone else thought she was coping, she felt as if she wasn’t doing either of them right. Mel’s standards – for herself – were staggeringly high.

The third part of the trinity, marriage, wasn’t something she had time to work on. It was just freewheeling along with its own momentum.

‘How does a working mother know when her partner has had an orgasm?’ went a recent email from an old college pal. ‘He phones home to tell her.’

It was the funniest thing Mel had heard for a long time, funny in an hysterical, life-raft-with-a-hole-in-it sort of way. But she couldn’t share the joke with anyone, especially her husband, Adrian, in case he remarked how accurate it was.

In their household, lovemaking occupied the same level of importance as time spent with each other (nil) and long baths with aromatherapy products to reduce stress (also nil).

Mel’s fervent hope was that if she kept quiet and jollied the house along, cheerily smiling at Adrian, Carrie and Sarah, then nobody would notice the places where her love and attention were spread thin.

‘Delegate, have some me-time and don’t let your family expect you to be superwoman,’ cooed magazine articles about the stress of the working mother.

After her years working with journalists, Mel knew that these articles were written by one of two types: glamorous young women in offices for whom the notion of children was a distant one; or working mothers who were freelancing at the kitchen table in between picking up the children from school, having long since realised that you couldn’t do it all, but were making a decent living telling people you could.

Me-time? What the hell was me-time? And how could you delegate the housework/weekly shop to a pair of under-fives and a man who didn’t know how to check can labels for sodium content or benzoates?

She ripped her laddered tights off and stuffed them into her bag before struggling into the new ones. With one last tug at the tourniquet-tight bit cutting into her thigh, she smoothed down the fabric of her plum-coloured skirt – last season Zara, designed to look like Gucci – and raced out of the loo to the mirrors, where she hastily combed her short blonde hair with her fingers. Her roots had grown beyond the boundaries of good taste and were teetering on the line between funky and couldn’t be bothered. Another task for her list.

At least she didn’t look forty yet, which was handy, because she had neither the time nor the money for Botox. Looking younger than she was had been hell when she was eighteen, looked four years younger and had to produce her student card to get into grown-up films. Now, two children and endless sleepless nights later, it was a blessing.

Nature had given Mel a small face with a pointed chin, pale skin and arched brows above almond-shaped eyes the same clear blue as the sky after a storm, with hints of violet around the pupils. Maybelline New York had given her thick black lashes and kiss-proof cherry lipstain that would survive a nuclear attack. A sense of humour meant she had plenty of smile lines around her mouth and she didn’t think she could stand the pain of doing anything about them. After her second labour, the one that had required the rubber ring for a week, she’d gone right off the idea of any sort of delicate stitching.

She looked at her watch. It was five past ten. Damn, damn, damn. Late. Too late for the lift. She galloped up the stairs, managing to find her lipgloss as she ran.

Edmund Moriarty, the chief executive of Lorimar Health Insurance, had just taken his seat at the top of the big conference room but there was still a mild hum of conversation, allowing Mel to slip in and make her way to a free seat on the left.

One of the biggest health insurance companies in the country, Lorimar had been a market leader for twenty years, but lots of new international firms were now on the scene and business was tough. Today’s gathering was a strategy meeting about how Lorimar could face the increased threat of competition.

Normally, strategy meetings were for high-level executives, and someone like Mel, who was one of the company’s four publicity managers, wouldn’t have been invited. But this was a ‘cheer up the team’ meeting, ‘to remind us that we’re still tops,’ as Hilary said, so lesser beings were there today with the firm’s big-hitters. Privately, Mel thought that the only things that would cheer up the Lorimar team were a pay rise and bringing in that Calvin Klein underwear model as post boy. She just thanked God it was merely a meeting today instead of paintballing in the back of beyond, which had been last year’s concept of team-building. Those paint balls bruised like hell.

Edmund Moriarty tapped his microphone to gain everybody’s attention and all heads snapped round in his direction.

‘How do we go forward? – that is the question,’ he began, his voice gravelly. ‘Lorimar is the market leader but stiff competition means we must keep striving.’

The seventy people in the room listened carefully. Mel took a pad of paper from her attaché case and uncapped the onyx and gold pen her parents had given her for her fortieth birthday. Although she dated the top piece of paper and kept her gaze on the boss, her mind was on the second sheet of paper. The top sheet was ready to be covered with gems of wisdom from the chief executive so that it looked as if she was paying attention. The other was the list of things Mel had to achieve that day – a day that was diminishing as Edmund pontificated to everyone about what they already knew. The list read:

Speech for Publicity Forum lunch.

Go over brochure photos with fine-tooth comb.

Phone Sentinel journalist re psychiatric case.

Pick up nappies, wipes and vegetables. Chicken, beans and kids’ yogurts.

Talk to Adrian about Saturday. His mother? Can’t ask mine.

Buy tights!!!

Fairy costume – where to buy?

Multitasking – a way of life, Mel knew, so that working mothers could hold on to their jobs and still keep the home fires burning.

She could see her female colleagues concentrating – or at least pretending to be – on what Edmund was saying. Hilary’s face wore that serene expression that said she was listening intently, but Vanessa was staring glassy-eyed at where he was standing and simultaneously trying to text on her mobile phone. Vanessa had a thirteen-year-old son, Conal, and apparently, thirteen-year-old boys were even harder to control than two under-five girls.

Vanessa was divorced and was Mel’s best friend in the company. They were nearly the same age, they had the same sense of humour and they’d both admitted privately to each other that balancing work and home life was ten times harder than doing the actual job at Lorimar.

‘If management knew just how good we were at doing four things at once – like organising to get the washing machine fixed, sorting out after-school activities, remembering to pick up groceries, and fire-fighting in the office, then we’d both be promoted like a shot,’ Mel had said the week before, when they were enjoying their once-a-month blow-out lunch at the Thai restaurant with the handsome young waiters.

‘Yes, but if we were promoted, we’d have to stay even later in the office in the evening and be even guiltier about it. So why even try to break the glass ceiling? Sorry, the guilt ceiling!’ Vanessa laughed, remembering their joke.

The promotion ceiling wasn’t made of glass for working mothers, they’d decided – it was made of maternal guilt.

‘Or possibly a gilt ceiling,’ Mel added thoughtfully. ‘Looks great but is fake close up. Like false boobs.’ She looked down at her own now-modest 34B cup. ‘I wish I had the money and the courage to get them done.’

‘Oh, stop going on about your boobs,’ Vanessa groaned. ‘They’re fine.’

‘Yeah, if fine means they droop down to my knees, then they’re perfectly fine,’ Mel grinned. ‘Anyway, we’ve got to stop using the word “fine”. Do you know what it stands for? Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional.’

‘Sounds just like me,’ said Vanessa. ‘Next time anyone asks me, I’ll say “I’m fine”.’ Hearing about struggles with Vanessa’s son made Mel feel sorry about how easy she had it by comparison. She had left having children until she was that bit older, which meant she was ready to settle down into motherhood when she became pregnant at thirty-five. Vanessa had found the double blue line when she was twenty-four.

Plus, Mel had a husband to share it all with. Vanessa had an ex-husband who had a new wife, a new family and no real interest in the mistakes of his youth apart from trying to weasel out of his maintenance payments for Conal. Sure, the washer/dryer was a mystery to Adrian, and he still laboured under the impression that elves filled the fridge at night by magic. But despite all that, he was there, another grown-up to share the parenting burdens. Nobody who’d seen him painstakingly doing jigsaws with Carrie or making dinosaurs out of Plasticine with Sarah could deny that he was a brilliant, incredibly patient dad. Mel’s own dinosaurs always looked like giant slugs.

She was lucky with childcare too. The Little Tigers Nursery beside Abraham Park on one of Carrickwell’s prettiest tree-lined roads was a fantastic place for children. Mel had heard such horror stories about day care: babies who were allergic to dairy products being given milk; toddlers getting gigantic bites from other children…There had never been any such problems with Little Tigers. But what would it be like when Sarah went to school? Mel wisely decided that she’d worry about that later.

She counted her blessings. Look at all the people who’d kill for what she had – a great job, a great husband and wonderful kids. OK, so there was never much time for herself, but there was some. And she was working, something she’d sworn she’d never give up when she had her babies. She was living the modern woman’s dream, wasn’t she?

An hour later, Edmund Moriarty was still going strong. ‘We care,’ he intoned now. ‘That’s the message we have to deliver to each and every one of our customers: Lorimar cares.’

Mel nodded along with everyone else: We care – message received, O glorious leader.

When Edmund’s laser gaze swept past her, like prison camp searchlights seeking out escapees, she went back to writing diligently on her notepad and sucked in her pelvic floor as she’d been shown in her one and only Pilates class. Might as well get something from the meeting.

Suck and hold for a count of ten. Pilates was the way forward and was even featured on the company’s health website – which Mel was involved in – as a way for people to get into shape. Mel still wished she’d been able to manage more than one class after childbirth but she’d been back in work three months after Sarah was born, two after Carrie, and there just hadn’t been the time to fit in Pilates. Her pelvic floor would have to stay as droopy as her boobs.

Finally, Edmund shut up and Mel was able to escape back to her desk. There were seventeen messages on her voice mail. They were all work-related except for the last one: ‘Hi, Mel, this is Dawna from Little Tigers. Just to remind you that tomorrow’s the zoo day for Sarah so she’ll need extra warm clothes, and that Carrie can go if you’d like, but if it rains we won’t take the little ones. I know it’s a bad time of year but the Siberian tigers are only going to be there for another week and we’ve promised the children we’d go. It’s fifty euro for both children – that covers the bus hire, entrance fee and lunch. Or twenty-five euro if it’s just Sarah. See you tonight. Bye.’

Mel added another note to her list. ‘Zoo day for girls. Leave money out for Adrian.’

Wednesday was Adrian’s morning for taking the girls to Little Tigers. Mel did the nursery run the other four mornings before getting the train from Carrickwell into the Lorimar offices in Dublin, but on Wednesdays there was a breakfast meeting of the marketing and publicity departments, so Mel had to be in work early. She remembered when getting up earlier on Wednesdays had been a total pain because she had to set her alarm clock for seven instead of half-past. That was before the children had come along, and before they’d moved to Carrickwell. Seven was a lie-in these days, now that Carrie woke up bright and breezy at six every morning.

‘Heyyo, Mummy,’ she’d lisp when Mel hurried into the darkened, Winnie-the-Pooh-papered bedroom, showered but sleepy. It was hard to be grumpy when that little smiling face shone up at her, eyes bright with anticipation of the day ahead and small, fat hands outspread to be scooped from the cot. Although she was two and a half, she still didn’t like to clamber out of the cot on her own, unlike her older sister, who’d been doing it from the age of two, but Mel knew it would happen any day now.

Early morning was one of Mel’s favourite parts of the day. The pure unadulterated joy of being with her children, them kissing her hello, their childish pleasure at another day – it was what kept her going.

No perfume in the world was as beautiful as the morning scent of baby skin, a magical smell of toddler biscuits, baby shampoo and pure little person. Carrie loved being cuddled and wanted at least five minutes of snuggling before she’d consent to being dressed. Mel was usually torn between wanting just as much cuddling but knowing that the clock was ticking on.

‘Lie about what?’ asked Mel, ready to do battle.

‘Lie about when the child has taken their first steps or whatever,’ Lorna went on blithely. ‘Apparently, they say the child has nearly done it, nearly walked, for example, so that when they do it at home, the parents think they’re witnessing it for the first time. Sad.’ She turned a fake smile on Mel. ‘Honestly, women have to cope with so much, don’t they?’ she said. ‘But it’s worth it. Children make it all worthwhile.’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Caroline.

‘You said it,’ added Val fervently.

Mel went through all the things she wanted to say to Lorna and thought she had better not.

The conversation whipped round to gossip about another friend of theirs who was about to get married for the second time and was having the wedding she’d always dreamed of on Australia’s Gold Coast. As the others talked about how they’d love to go but couldn’t, Mel felt herself sinking into the sort of self-berating misery that no amount of White Cranberry Ices could defeat.

Lorna’s needling got to her every time for one simple reason: because Mel was so terribly scared that Lorna was right. If only Lorna could be more sensitive…After all, not everyone could afford to stay at home with their kids.

Adrian was half asleep when Mel slipped under the duvet beside him. It was after twelve and she felt sick at the thought that she had to be up again in just over five hours.

‘Did you have a good time?’ he murmured, turning to put one arm around her.

Mel snuggled into his embrace. The heating was off and she felt cold. Adrian was always warm and it was a long-running joke between them that he wanted just a sheet and the lightest duvet imaginable on the bed in winter, while she wanted an electric blanket, about four heavy blankets and a flannelette, instant-turn-off nightie.

‘It was fine,’ she said, settling herself into the comfiest position against him. But it hadn’t been.

Lorna had been all set for going to a nightclub when Mel got up to leave, pleading exhaustion.

‘You used to be a wild woman!’ Lorna had said in the accusatory tone of the blind drunk as Mel pulled on her coat and checked that she had enough money for a taxi to the train station. ‘What’s happened to you? Are we such boring friends that you don’t have time for us any more, is that really it?’

After an entire night of feeling guilty for the fact that she no longer had enough time to meet up with the girls more than a couple of times a year, Mel’s patience snapped.

‘I have a job, Lorna, a job where I have to produce results all day, and then, when I go home, I get to do all the work that you do but in about a quarter of the time. So forgive me if I’m not ready to party on all night but if I have a hangover, I can’t go back to bed when the kids have gone to school. My job won’t wait like the shopping or the washing. I’m not my own boss, you see.’

She was being unfair but she didn’t care. Lorna had been unfair about Mel having to work: if she dished it, she should be able to take it.

‘And since you find my company so boring,’ Mel finished, ‘don’t bother to phone me next time you want a big night out where you get pissed and compare parent/teacher council stories. I don’t have time for that. I’m too busy missing all the milestones in my children’s lives.’

She’d left then, with Caroline, Val and Lorna staring open-mouthed after her. In the taxi to the train station, Mel had cursed herself for letting Lorna goad her. Why hadn’t she held her tongue? It wasn’t even that she’d been horrible to Lorna that mattered – Lorna was plastered and wouldn’t remember any of it. And it was about time Lorna got some of her own medicine. Hurting Caroline, however, was different. Caroline was a true friend and now she’d think that Mel was one of those bitchy career women who looked down on stay-at-home mothers, when she wasn’t. It was all such a mess.

‘How’s Caroline?’ asked Adrian sleepily.

‘She’s OK,’ Mel said. There was no point bothering him with any of this.

‘We missed you,’ Adrian said, his voice muffled against the silk of her hair.

‘Missed you too,’ she said truthfully. ‘Go to sleep, love. Sorry for waking you up.’

‘I couldn’t sleep properly until you were in,’ he said.

In the darkness, Mel smiled and curled her body closer into the curve of his. She was lucky to have a husband like Adrian. He told her he loved her and missed her. Not all men were able to be as honest. They made a good team and they’d get through the difficult times together, or so Adrian was always saying. It was just that the difficult times seemed to outweigh the good ones lately.

The next day, Mel didn’t phone Caroline until just before lunch, when she knew her friend would be at home after the morning school run and the inevitable grocery shopping.

For the first time in their friendship, Caroline’s tone was frosty. ‘You didn’t need to be so hard on Lorna,’ she said sharply.

At her desk, Mel rubbed her tired face. Lack of sleep made her forget all the things she’d planned to say.

‘Lorna made a difficult choice to stay at home with her children and give up her career for the moment; that doesn’t mean she’s a non-person,’ Caroline continued. ‘We’re fed up with people asking, “What do you do?” and then tuning out when you say you stay at home with your kids. It’s bad enough when men do it without another woman doing it too. I thought you understood why I gave up my job, Mel – that I couldn’t bear to leave my babies for someone else to bring up. If I’d known that you really looked down on me, then I wouldn’t have kept in touch with you. I’ve got plenty of new friends who do what I do; I don’t need to cling on to you for old times’ sake just because we once sat at desks opposite each other and bitched about our boss.’

‘Don’t be like that, Caroline,’ Mel begged. ‘I didn’t mean it like that, you know I didn’t. I don’t look down on you. In fact,’ she laughed without mirth, ‘I think the boot’s on the other foot.’ Why didn’t Caroline understand that working mothers like Mel felt that the stay-at-home mothers like Lorna looked down on them? ‘I wish I could stay at home and look after Carrie and Sarah too,’ she began, and stopped in shock. There, she’d said it. She’d told someone her deepest secret, the secret she’d only just recognised in herself. She did wish she could stay at home. She was tired of her life, tired of running on a treadmill like a caffeined-up hamster and never getting anywhere.

‘Of course, I know what you mean,’ said Caroline, sarcasm glittering in her voice. ‘You wish you could lounge around all day at home because that’s what you think it’s like, but it’s not. It’s not meandering round the shops and meeting other housewives for coffee and doing the odd bit of washing and ironing at home in between watching Oprah. It’s damn hard and very boring.’

‘I know, I realise that,’ stammered Mel. ‘You’ve got me wrong…’

‘You think I don’t remember what it was like to have an interesting job and have people look up to me? To earn my own money and use my talents to the full?’ Caroline went on shakily. ‘And now I’m just a stay-at-home mother, a housewife, a dependant, and nobody respects that. Graham jokes that I’m the CEO of the household but this is the only CEO job where nobody places the slightest value on what you do. I thought you understood all this, and that occasionally it was nice for me to touch the old world again with you and remember what it used to be like, but I can see I was wrong. You just look down on me.’

‘No, Caroline,’ begged Mel, ‘I don’t. It’s just that Lorna really gets at me…’

‘Mel, I don’t have time to talk to you right now.’ Caroline spoke crisply. ‘I have things to do. Oprah’s going to be on TV any minute and I’d hate to miss it. Goodbye.’ And she hung up.

‘Caroline, no…’ How had they got themselves in this mess? Just when Mel suddenly understood why Caroline had given up her job in favour of taking care of her three little boys? Because now, finally, after years of trying to keep all the balls in the air, that’s what Mel wanted too.

Hardly had Mel a chance to put the receiver back in the cradle, when the phone rang again.

‘Mel, I’m sorry, I know it’s lunchtime but I’ve got a journalist from the Echo on the line,’ said Sue, the department assistant, ‘a Peter Glennon and he’s phoning about a statistic on the website about heart disease and how they aren’t the right figures for Ireland.’

‘Put him through,’ said Mel pleasantly, as if she hadn’t just got off the phone from a horrible conversation with one of her oldest friends. Lunch, like thinking about her row with Caroline, could wait. Everything had to wait for work, didn’t it? Her life, her family, her friends. Work ruled.