Someone Like You

‘Well, madam, having a rest while your poor mother works as usual.’

The sound of her father’s voice made Emma jump to her feet guiltily. She felt as if she really was doing something wrong, the way she felt when she passed a police car with a radar gun out the window, even if she was only crawling along at thirty miles an hour. His very presence could plunge her into nervous tension, even now when she was so very hopeful about her precious baby.

‘Anne-Marie, there’s really no need to be doing Emma’s dirty work for her,’ Jimmy O’Brien said, treating his elder daughter to a disapproving stare. ‘She’s big enough and ugly enough to do her own housework. I won’t have you skivvying for her.’

‘I wasn’t skivvying,’ said her mother, her voice losing its liveliness and becoming weary.

‘Mother was just rubbing up something spilt,’ Emma protested, feeling all her good humour fade away as it so inevitably did whenever her father was involved. ‘I cleaned that fridge out yesterday…’

But her father was no longer listening. Striding over to the bin, he knocked out the old tobacco at the bottom of his pipe and began to fill his wife in on his recent activities.

‘I’ve filled the car with petrol, checked the air in the tyres and put in half a litre of oil,’ he announced. ‘We’re all shipshape, if you’re ready to go, Anne-Marie.’

You’d think we were driving to bloody Egypt, Emma thought with irritation.

For about the hundredth time since the trip had been booked, she wondered why she was going. It had been her father’s idea: the holiday of a lifetime to celebrate his and his wife’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Emma couldn’t figure out why he’d picked such an exotic destination as Egypt. Her father was a man who, for the past fifteen years, had been perfectly content to go to Portugal, sit watching sports coverage in a bar and comment loudly on how downmarket the place was getting what with all the football hooligans and brazen young girls running around with suitcases full of condoms looking for men.

‘Tarts,’ he’d say darkly every time a gang of carefree, tanned girls in skimpy T-shirts and bum-skimming shorts appeared on the scene.

Emma used to gaze wistfully at these modern babes: she was damn sure they wouldn’t still be going on holiday with their parents when they were in their twenties, too afraid of the furore to suggest a holiday with their boyfriends. Until she’d been married, she and Pete had only been away to the sun once when she’d pretended to be away with some girlfriends.

His comments about how young people’s standards were dropping notwithstanding, her father appeared to enjoy Portugal. But one holiday programme presenter enthusing over a Nile cruise had changed everything. Jimmy had ordered a vast assortment of brochures and spent many happy hours over Sunday lunch reading out the bits he was most interested in.

‘Listen to this,’ he’d say, blithely interrupting any other conversation with the insensitivity of a despot, ‘ “Enjoy the spectacle of Luxor and Karnak temples. Both monuments are perfect examples of ancient Egyptian architecture. Parts of Karnak Temple date back to 1375 BC.” That’s bloody incredible, we’ve got to go.’

Unfortunately, the ‘we’ also meant Pete and Emma.

‘No way, Emma. Why can’t they go on their own and just make each other miserable instead of making us all miserable,’ Pete complained, which was quite an out of character thing for him to say. Genuinely kind and warm, Pete couldn’t be nasty if he tried, but even his legendary patience was strained by her parents. Well, her father, really. Jimmy O’Brien strained a lot of people’s patience.

‘I know, love,’ Emma said wearily. She felt so torn; torn between doing what easy-going Pete wanted and what her domineering father wanted. ‘It’s just that he hasn’t stopped talking about it and he’s assuming we’ll go too. He’ll harp on about how ungrateful we are if we don’t go.’ Emma didn’t need to say any more. Ever since her father had loaned herself and Pete the deposit money for their house, he’d been holding it over their heads like a sword of Damocles.

Going out with friends for Sunday instead of going to the O’Briens’ for lunch was seen as a sign of ungratefulness. So was being too busy to pick up Jimmy’s new bifocals from that shop in town, or not being able to drive Anne-Marie to the shops because she’d got nervous about driving her own car for some unaccountable reason. The way things were going, the next time Emma refused a liquorice on the grounds that she didn’t like the taste, that too would be seen as ungratefulness.

Pete said nothing more about the trip. Emma knew he wanted her to stand up to her father for once and refuse to go so that they could spend the money going away together later. But Emma, who knew she’d feel guilty about leaving Pete but would suffer ten times more if she crossed Jimmy O’Brien, finally figured out a solution.

‘Pete can’t go to Egypt that week, Dad,’ she lied. ‘He’s got a two-day conference in Belfast. But I’ll go – won’t that be nice, just the three of us together, like old times?’

The old times reference did the trick. Which was ironic, Emma thought. Her memory of bygone holidays consisted of the feeling that they’d merely changed the setting for her father’s daily sarcastic remarks. But, hilariously, he didn’t see it like that: Jimmy was delighted with the holiday plan.

Pete was staying at home, sweetly telling Emma that it was all right, he’d go away with the lads for a football weekend later in the year, so she wasn’t to worry. All she had to do now was actually get through the damn trip.

‘I think I need a cup of tea before I go,’ her mother said, dropping the cloth and leaning against Emma’s sink, the perfect picture of fatigue. Her mother’s put-upon act was like a red rag to a bull where Jimmy was concerned. Somebody had to be to blame for his wife’s exhaustion.

Emma knew what would come next: she’d have to make tea and be berated for making her poor mother do her housework. There was no point explaining what had really happened. This particular tableau had taken place so many times over the years, they were all like pantomime characters acting out parts they’d played for thirty years.

You’re a lazy, stupid girl, Emma.

Oh no I’m not!

Oh yes you are!

Emma watched her parents dispassionately for a moment, watched them taking over her house as if they owned it. She really wasn’t in the mood for a re-run of their familiar power-play game.

She’d recognized what it was ever since she’d bought the self-help books. Her father was a control freak and her mother was passive aggressive, able to slip into her ‘poor me’ routine as soon as her husband appeared in order to be fussed over. Or so it seemed. All the books had different variations on this type of relationship but Emma could see her parents in each one.

However, while it was all very well knowing what people were, it was a different kettle of fish altogether figuring out what to do about it. As Emma had long since worked out that she was plain old passive and desperately lacking in self-confidence when it came to her family, there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about their behaviour.

Her problem was herself, she had realized from Chapter Seven: ‘Taking Responsibility For Your Own Mistakes’. There was no use spending hours bitterly contemplating her family’s behaviour without changing her own. She let them get away with it. Only she could change things.

‘The power is within your own grasp,’ said guru Cheyenne Kawada, author of You Only Have One Life To Lead, So Don’t Waste It.

The problem was that she was two people: with her parents, she was clumsy Emma, the elder, less successful daughter – Kirsten was the prodigal – and the one who’d sidestepped a job in her father’s business (the only time she’d ever refused him anything). In the office, she was Emma Sheridan, the much admired Special Projects Coordinator of the KrisisKids Charity who had several people working for her and who organized the charity’s confidential child phoneline as well as two conferences a year.

Her parents had no idea that the businesslike, organized Emma existed, and certainly nobody at KKC would have recognized the put-upon Emma as their capable boss.

‘You sit down, love, let me make the tea,’ Jimmy O’Brien was saying manfully to his wife as he rummaged through Emma’s tidy cupboards for teabags, sending packets of sauce mixes and a jar of soy sauce flying.

Her mother waved the idea away, as if she was dying for a cup but had heroically decided to say no, like someone refusing a life jacket on the Titanic. ‘We don’t have enough time, Jimmy.’

‘We would have time if you hadn’t worn yourself to the bone tidying up after this lazy madam.’ Slamming the cupboard, Jimmy harrumphed and his entire body shook with the noise. His huge cream jumper-clad frame dwarfed everything in the compact room. He was easily as tall as the pine larder and just as wide, big shoulders and flowing white beard making him a dead ringer for Santa Claus.

Luckily for Anne-Marie O’Brien, she wasn’t Mrs Claus to her husband’s Santa. Tall but melba toast thin, her hair was a carefully dyed fading gold, worn long but with a front section drawn back from her forehead with a large hairclip that sat at the back of her head like an ossified tortoiseshell beetle. In her floral belted summer dress, she looked as trim as the housewife in a fifties commercial and amazingly youthful. Ten years younger than her husband, Anne-Marie had the clear unwrinkled skin of someone who was utterly sure she was going to heaven in the afterlife, thanks to her goodness and her constant devout prayers. She’d never contemplated whether her love of spreading gossip might hinder her immediate path to the Pearly Gates.

Emma, as tall and slim as her mother but with silky, pale brown hair and a sweet, patient face instead of a smug one, watched tight-lipped as her mother meticulously wiped the chrome-plated toaster and kettle, oblivious to the fact that they needed to be polished with a dry cloth if you didn’t want to leave big smeary streaks on them.

Pete’s favourite present from their wedding three years ago, the chrome appliances were by far the poshest things in their kitchen. Dear Pete. He always told her to ‘turn the other cheek’ when her father irritated her. Pete’s devout upbringing had equipped him with a biblical quote for every situation in life. He was certainly right this time. No matter how hard it was to stoically turn the other cheek when Jimmy O’Brien’s famously sharp tongue carved you up, Emma knew it was the only way to cope. Arguing with her father merely drove him into the white-hot rage of ‘I’m only doing this for your own good, madam.’

‘Turn the other cheek,’ she repeated mantra-like, slipping out of the kitchen. She went upstairs to her and Pete’s bedroom. Decorated in a mixture of forest green and warm olive, it was the most masculine room in the house.

Emma had picked the colours herself, determined that the first bedroom she slept in as a married woman would be nothing like the frilled, pink chintz girlie rooms her mother had insisted on in the family home. After a lifetime living with more frills than Scarlett O’Hara’s wedding dress, Emma had wanted a room that was comfortingly simple. Pete, so laid back décor-wise that he’d have slept happily in a Wendy house, said he’d like anything Emma chose.

So she’d picked simple olive green curtains, a modern blonde wood bed with its stark green duvet cover and had painted the fitted wardrobe unit that surrounded the bed in cool cream. There wasn’t a flounce, a ribbon or a ballerina print in sight. The Flower Fairies drawings her mother had donated ‘to brighten the place up’ had pride of place in the downstairs loo because Emma never went in there except to clean it.

‘Are you coming, Emma?’ demanded her father from downstairs.

Picking up her handbag and her suitcase, Emma struggled out on to the landing, with one last fond look at her bedroom. She’d miss it. And Pete. She’d miss cuddling up to him in bed, feeling his solid body spooned against hers. She’d miss his sense of fun and the way he loved her so much. Emma could do no wrong in Pete Sheridan’s eyes, which was certainly a change from the way her parents felt about her.

They stood at the bottom of the stairs, one impatient, the other anxious.

‘You’re not wearing that, Emma?’ said her mother in a shrill tone as Emma rounded the bend in the stairs, suitcase in hand.

Instinctively, one hand shot up to her chest, touching the soft denim fabric of her dungarees. Cool and very comfortable, they were ideal for travelling. ‘I was wearing this when you came in,’ Emma muttered, wishing she didn’t feel like a teenager being chastised for wearing PVC hot-pants to dinner with the bishop.

She was a thirty-one-year-old married woman, for God’s sake! She would not be bullied.

‘I thought you’d gone up to change,’ sighed her mother in martyred tones. ‘I’d prefer to travel looking respectable. I’ve read that people who dress up for travel are most likely to get upgraded,’ she added with a satisfied sniff at the thought of being escorted past the riffraff to a luxury bit of the plane worthy of the O’Briens of the poshest bit of Castleknock.