Someone Like You

‘It has to be special,’ Emma said, ‘but I’ve racked my brains and I can’t come up with anything.’

‘I never know what to buy for Mum. Come on, let’s hustle.’ Kirsten stabbed out her third cigarette, got up and led the way to the down escalator. ‘She’s getting worse to buy things for. I asked her the other day if she’d used that beauty salon voucher I gave her for Christmas and she said, “What voucher?” I swear she’s losing her marbles.’

The nagging worry at the back of Emma’s subconscious suddenly leapt to the front of the mental queue. ‘What did you say?’

‘That she’s losing her marbles. Well, she is, Em. Before you all went to Egypt, I was on the phone to her and she asked me how Patrick’s parents were. I mean, Jesus, his father is dead two years. Do you think she’s on something that’s making her dopey? That’s got to be it. You’d need tranquillizers to live with Dad, after all, so I couldn’t blame her…’

As Kirsten chattered away, Emma made herself face up to the notion that had been rippling through her head like quicksilver for months: there was something wrong with her mother. Something wrong with her mind.

All that panicking when they’d been away, the way she’d clung on to her Egyptian currency and refused to hand it over when she was shopping, convinced she was being fiddled by the vendors. She kept trying to go into the wrong cabin, which Jimmy had found irritating. And the way she kept losing things – her glasses, the thread of the conversation. It wasn’t normal, Emma knew it.

‘I think you’re right,’ she said shakily.

‘Really?’ Kirsten said, sounding pleased and running a hand through her glossy hair. ‘I thought you preferred my hair blonde. Patrick loves this colour, says it’s very sexy…’

‘No, I mean about Mum. I think she is losing her marbles. What a horrible phrase, it’s so demeaning. What I mean is that she’s confused and acting strangely. That sounds like…’ Emma hesitated, not even wanting to say the word, ‘…senile dementia.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Kirsten snapped. ‘She’s far too young for that. Old people get it, not Mum. Let’s not talk about it, right?’

Kirsten hated facing the harder side of life and as a child had often simply refused to talk about things which upset her, like her dreadful exam results and the scathing remarks her teachers made in her homework notebook about her disruptive behaviour in class.

‘I’m sorry, Kirsten,’ Emma said firmly, ‘we’ve got to talk about it. Not talking about it won’t make it go away. That’s like having a breast lump and not going to the doctor – the “If I don’t see it, it can’t hurt me” theory.’

‘I’d go to the doctor if I had a breast lump,’ Kirsten insisted.

‘So says the woman who refused to go to the dentist for three years.’

‘That’s different. Now come on, we’re running out of time, Em. We’ve got to buy something for Mum and I want to go into Mango first and see if they’ve any nice things in.’

Emma gave up and followed her sister into the clothes shop. There was no point in arguing with Kirsten when she’d made up her mind. Besides, she was probably right. Dementia was something old people got.

Kirsten strode off to where racks of tiny clothes hung, so Emma headed for the long, suitable-for-the-office skirt department. After a cursory look at some plain grey and black skirts that looked like all the other skirts in her wardrobe, she wandered back to where Kirsten was rifling through a rail of stretchy net tops that looked as if they wouldn’t fit an eight-year-old. Selecting two acid pink ones that would either look amazing or desperate with her hair colour, Kirsten mooched on to the next rail.

‘Aren’t these peachy!’ she said, focusing on skinny black trousers with a line of silver beading down each seam.

‘Try them on,’ Emma said mechanically, the way she’d done for years when they’d shopped as teenagers. Her role had been to hold the handbags and supply different sizes while Kirsten enraged the changing-room queue by spending at least half an hour in the cubicle, discarding things like Imelda Marcos on a shoe-buying frenzy.

‘Yes, I think I will try them. But I’ll just get a couple of other things. No point stripping off for two tops and a pair of trousers.’

As Kirsten scanned the rails with the narrowed eyes of an expert, Emma thought about their mother. She wished she could be like Kirsten and simply not confront problems, or just put them out of her mind. But she couldn’t. Something was wrong with Anne-Marie, she knew it. And she hoped – no, she prayed – it wasn’t senile dementia.

She’d read snippets about it, articles she’d half-scanned in women’s magazines in between fashion features and the problem pages. She’d never exactly been interested, but that curious desire to read about other people’s suffering, if only to thank your lucky stars it wasn’t happening to you, had meant she’d absorbed some information about the disease. A slow, insidious intruder, it crept into people’s minds and took over, making its presence known gradually with moments of forgetfulness, before leading up to…what, exactly? Emma wasn’t sure. Did people die from it?

Waiting outside the cubicle for Kirsten, she tried to put the whole thing out of her mind. Kirsten was right. Their mother was too young…wasn’t she?

‘Great Aunt Petra isn’t coming, is she?’ groaned Kirsten, looking at Emma’s rough table plan for their mother’s birthday dinner.

‘Of course she is,’ Emma said, emerging from basting the goose again, her face puce with heat and exertion. ‘She’s Dad’s only living aunt and he’d go mental if she wasn’t invited.’

‘She’s an unhinged bitch and everybody hates her,’ protested Kirsten. ‘If Dad wants to invite her to their bloody house, that’s his business. I don’t know why the rest of us have to put up with her.’

‘Yeah,’ snapped Emma, fed up with the lack of catering help Kirsten had provided since she’d arrived an hour previously with her hair newly blow-dried and no obvious intention of doing anything useful. ‘And who’d have to put up with the full-scale row there’d be if she wasn’t here? Me, that’s who. I’d never hear the end of it.’

‘Emma, would you listen to yourself? You’re an adult, this is your house and you can invite who you bloody want to. Let Dad throw a tantrum if he wants. Ignore him. I do.’ Kirsten ran a lilac fingernail down the list. ‘Monica and Timmy Maguire! Ugh, he’ll get poor Patrick in a corner and ask him what he should do with his shares, as usual. I told Patrick to ask for a fee next time.’

‘You’re bloody great at telling people what to do,’ hissed Emma, finally having had enough. She was hot, sweaty, tired and fed up with Kirsten. ‘Did you come here to help or to simply point out what an inadequate human being I am?’

Kirsten refused to be riled. ‘Keep your hair on, Sis,’ she answered. ‘You’re only pissed off because you know I’m right. If you don’t stand up to Dad some day, you may as well move back home – because you’re totally under his thumb as it is.’

Emma felt her anger deflate like a pricked balloon. Her eyes filled with tears. The goose wasn’t half-cooked, the guests were rolling up in an hour and Pete, who’d promised to be home early, was stuck with a client in Maynooth and wouldn’t be back until at least seven.

‘It’s easy for you,’ she told Kirsten, feeling hot, angry tears flooding down her face. ‘You’ve always been their pet. You could tell Dad to fuck off and he’d smile indulgently at you. But he hates me; I can never do anything right for him. All I want is some respect – it’s not too much to ask, is it?’ She tried to rub away the tears but they kept coming.

If fury had no effect on Kirsten, neither did weeping, which was why she so successfully dealt with her father’s machinations.

‘He doesn’t hate you, Sis,’ she said calmly, ignoring Emma’s tears. ‘He’s a bully and you’ve let yourself be his own personal punchbag. I can’t help you and neither can Pete. You’re on your own. Jesus, Emma, if you can run that bloody office, then you can certainly deal with Dad, can’t you? Now, what do you want me to do next? You better go upstairs and make yourself presentable or Petra the Gorgon will have a few choice insults to fling at you about how you’re letting yourself go now that you’re married.’

If the birthday dinner proved anything, it proved that their fears about their mother were unfounded. Anne-Marie sailed into the house with her husband in tow, face wreathed in smiles and new earrings to be admired. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ she said coquettishly, pulling back a strand of long, pale gold hair, which flowed loosely around her shoulders. ‘They’re from your father.’ She kissed Kirsten happily.

‘Darling Kirsten, I don’t know what was wrong with me the other day, I found that lovely voucher you gave me for Christmas. I know it’s bad of me, but I completely forgot about it and now it’s out of date, but it was a lovely thought. I couldn’t see anything with those old glasses, but look –’ she produced new glasses with snazzy gold frames – ‘I’ve got new ones and reading is no problem any more. Hello, Emma love, there’s a nice smell coming from the kitchen. I hope it’s not goose; you know Auntie Petra says it gives her indigestion ever since we had it at her Roland’s christening back in 1957.’

Emma and Kirsten shared a conspiratorial grin. ‘All the more reason for cooking goose, eh?’ whispered Kirsten.

Emma nodded with relief. Her mother was perfectly all right. It was obvious there was nothing wrong with her mind. Nobody who could remember the ill-effects of a goose at a christening in 1957 could possibly have anything wrong with their brain.

Half an hour later, all the guests were there, wandering around the house and chatting. Emma was standing in the kitchen beside the dining-room door, hurriedly ironing the napkins she’d just removed from the drier. Her mother would have had a fit if she’d produced paper ones.

‘It’s a lovely dining room,’ she heard Monica Maguire say. ‘I like these pictures,’ she added, obviously admiring the Paul Klee prints Emma loved.

‘Well, it’s not to my taste,’ Emma overheard her father say gruffly. ‘Still, what can you say. I mean, myself and Anne-Marie gave them the deposit money for it and we’d have liked to have helped them with decorating advice, but you know youngsters, ungrateful.’

Emma stood behind the door into the dining room and felt cold rage flood through her. How dare he tell people he’d given them the deposit money for the house! How dare he! That was their private life. And he hadn’t given it to them, anyway. She and Pete had insisted on treating it as a loan and were paying money into her parents’ account every month. But to casually tell a neighbour about it, as if she and Pete were kids or freeloaders who used and abused…That was terrible, awful. A fierce rage for her father burned in her peaceful soul. God she hated that man!

CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_4333d60f-3cba-5601-aa8d-c361722eb7d2)

Leonie was not thrilled with herself. Despite spending many arm-aching hours painting, the kitchen did not look the way she wanted it to. The plan had been simple: inspired by endless television make-overs, Leonie had convinced herself that she too could turn a small cottage kitchen into an exotic Egyptian-inspired room with the aid of midnight blue paint, some artistic stencilling and a can of metallic spray paint. Unfortunately, what looked easy in half an hour on the telly with scores of helpers, expert carpenters, an interior designer and an entire TV crew ready to help out if necessary, wasn’t easy in real life. After three evenings and her entire Sunday spent knee-deep in old newspapers with the animals sulking in another room, the kitchen looked desperate. Two of the walls were a frighteningly dark midnight blue with silver stars supposedly reflecting the silver of the knobs she’d bought for the cupboards. The cupboards themselves had been painted primrose to go with both the freshly painted woodwork and the other two walls, but instead of gliding on to the carefully prepared surfaces, the paint had dried in myriad globules so it looked as if the doors had developed smallpox.

Her idea of having stars on the ceiling had been lovely and very celestial, but midnight blue everywhere had made the room – small and, luckily, south-facing – a bit gloomy. So she’d wearily repainted two walls. It took three coats of primrose to cover the blue.

Meanwhile, the stencilled border, which the stencil book she’d borrowed from the library described as ‘an Egyptian-inspired motif of birds and animals’, resembled something inexpert four-year-olds might daub on their first day at school in between peeing in their seats and sobbing for their mummies.

‘It’s a bit ambitious, Leonie,’ her mother had remarked kindly when she arrived that afternoon with some flowers from her garden and home-made tea brack to celebrate the children’s return.

‘I like it better today,’ Claire said, finding a vase for the off-white roses and putting the kettle on to boil at the same time. ‘It was too dark when it was all blue.’

‘I know.’ Covered with paint and exhausted after forty-eight hours of decorating, Leonie was shattered. Her black leggings were like a Rorschach blot of primrose and blue paint, and Danny’s old grey sweatshirt wasn’t much better. Every inch of her hands was crusty with emulsion and she needed an hour in the bath at least.

‘What have you been up to all day, Mum?’ Leonie asked, reaching under the table to pet Penny’s silky ears. Penny, who’d been largely ignored during the painting, hummed in bliss.