A Very Accidental Love Story

In the end, of all people, my sister Helen ends up being my saviour, my messiah in this hour of need. In total and utter desperation, I put out not so much a distress flare as an SOS to her, and to my astonishment and eternal gratitude, she tells me not to panic, that she’ll be on the next train up to Dublin from Cork.

Miracle. It’s a bloody miracle. I feel huge gratitude, mixed with a pang of sharp guilt when I think of how dismissively I’ve treated her over the years. And now, here she is, in my hour of need, dropping everything and running just to give me a dig out.

Hours later, while I’m still at home dealing with the massive backlog of phone calls and replying to all my emails from the office, while simultaneously seeing off Madam Elka, my nagging conscience won’t let up on me.

Would I have done the same for Helen?

The answer’s obvious. Not a bleeding snowball’s chance.

Bad mother, bad sister … Soul searching is something I rarely have the luxury of spare time to indulge in, but somehow there’s just no avoiding it today.

And then there’s little Lily, snoozing peacefully on the sofa, clinging to her battered and almost threadbare comfort blankie, worn out after all the high-octane drama of her day.

She’ll forget all about that other matter, I think smugly to myself, feeling a cool, tigerish joy flood over me at the happy sight of Elka finally getting her arse out of here in a taxi. She’ll wake up shortly, all refreshed and happy after her nap and the whole notion of her father will all have been banished right out of her little head, as though it never was.

I continue to think that as I tidy the spare room to get it ready for Helen. I still think it when Lily wakes up, beams to see me still in the house, then immediately waddles upstairs to her bedroom.

She’s ages in there, and in between firing off an email to Seth Coleman and putting a clean duvet cover on the spare bed, I suddenly realise the child is gone suspiciously quiet, so I stick my head round her bedroom door to do a lightning quick check on her.

‘Look at me Mama!’ she squeals excitedly as soon as she sees me, twirling round in the outfit she’s just changed into. A pink leotard and a matching fluffy tutu with bits of diamanté all over it, along with sparkly little pumps in … what else? Bubblegum pink.

‘You look lovely sweetheart,’ I tell her distractedly. ‘Now come on downstairs, I want you to have some dinner.’

‘NO! I HATE dinner! And I’m playing dwess up!’

‘Later, you can play dress up later. Is this so you can wear something pretty for Auntie Helen?’

‘NO Mama!’ she yells at me, stomping her foot in a gesture that a silent movie actress would shudder to use. ‘This is what I’m going to wear when we go to meet my daddy. Like you pwomised. Wemember? You pwomised!’

With that, the mobile tucked into my suit pocket rang out loud and clear. And this time, I never even bothered checking to see who it was.

Chapter Three

Pay absolutely no attention to this, I tell Helen as soon as she’s settled in and used to us all. Lily’s just developed a bee in her bonnet about the whole idea of having a dad and maybe even getting to meet him, nothing more. But she’ll pretty soon forget all about it; wait and see. All we need to do is starve the whole thing of oxygen. Simple as that. Not unlike my strategy with her whenever she’s stomping her feet and demanding whole dessert spoonfuls of Nutella on top of her toast for her breakfast on our Sundays together; I just blatantly ignore it, distract her by dangling some kind of toy in her face and in no time, all her little demands disappear as though they never were.

Such are the vagaries of being almost three years old it seems; you’re cursed with the short-term memory of a fruit fly. What was bringing on hysterics two seconds ago is banished instantly at the sight of anything pink and glittery dangled in front of your face. Complete doddle.

I continue to believe that the whole ‘when am I meeting my daddy?’ issue has finally been put to bed right up to the following weekend which, in spite of my best efforts, is the next window of peace I get from work, so I can spend a bit of time at home.

I race home on Friday night so I can give Lily her bath and put her to bed, aching to do some mother/daughter bonding with her, but to my dismay I find out I’m already too late.

Helen’s waiting up for me, watching TV while texting away on her phone downstairs in the family room, wearing an oversized dressing gown and a mansize pair of fleecy socks, sofa-lising. (New buzzword dreamt up by Marc, from Arts and Culture. A bastardisation of words to describe the act of socialising whilst your bum is glued to the sofa. Marc, as you see, is very fond of his word mash-ups.)

She doesn’t hear me slip into the kitchen at the far end of the room and looking at her from this distance all I can think is … so much about Helen has changed over the years and yet so much has stayed exactly the same. She’s gained weight, but she’s lucky, it happens to suit her. Fills her face out and makes her look even younger. She still has the same even temperament and insuppressibly sunny good humour, the exact same general Pollyanna, glass-half-full outlook on life, at all times, always. Just like an air hostess, smiling through her pretty, even white teeth and unfailingly polite, even when living under the same roof as a termagant like me.

She and I don’t look even remotely alike. Helen is bright-eyed and fair-haired, with a sunny, sparkly, outgoing personality to match; not so much a glass-half-full person, as a Waterford crystal, limited edition glass, half full of rare, vintage champagne. Then there’s me; small, dark, unsmiling, with deathly, Morticia Addams-pale skin that’s the bane of my life and a permanently hollow, sunken-eyed look about me, which, in spite of the most expensive face creams money will buy, still seems to be permanently etched in.

Helen’s adopted you see, something which always left me with the lifelong sensation that I somehow wasn’t good enough for my parents, which was why they felt the need to go out shopping for another daughter, as I’d seen it at the time. It had hurt me as a little girl, hurt me far more deeply then I ever let on, and to this day remains a searingly vivid memory, one that still has the power to sting even now, from a safe distance of decades. Coming home from primary school to be told by Dad that there was a ‘surprise’ waiting for me in the good front room. Course I was all excited at first, then bitterly disappointed to discover nothing other than my battered old cot with a new baby sleeping in it. I’d thought at the very least that I was getting a new home computer or a maths set. Something useful.

As time went on though, I realised the truth; that Mum and Dad had just brought home what appeared to the five-year-old me to be an improved version of what a little daughter should be. One who grew up to be pretty and blonde who lisped and giggled and wore pink and got invited everywhere. And although they’d die rather than admit it, one who they both clearly preferred; to this day, I can still hear the three of them happily laughing and messing about while watching some TV programme together night after night, like a proper family. All while I sat all alone upstairs in my room, getting ahead on the next day’s homework and trying to choke back hot, furious tears at being so blatantly excluded. Five years old was a young age to learn all about rejection, and yet that’s exactly what I had to do.

Course years later, after several gin and tonics, my mother has told me that this actually wasn’t the case at all; that she and Dad were if anything just utterly exhausted and worn out by all the various demands involved in rearing a child genius – the special tutorial classes, the constant IQ tests, the violin/cello/clarinet lessons, the way I never seemed to need sleep for more than a few hours, instead reading book after book throughout the long, lonely nights.

According to Mum, they could deal with all that though; what worried them was always hearing that other kids in my class were organising birthday parties for their friends, trips to the movies or else days out to the zoo, none of which I ever seemed to be invited to. But once they adopted little Helen, all that changed for them; because this, thank God, was a more normal child, one who failed maths tests and struggled with her reading, but who was bubbly and friendly and perennially popular; forever getting invited out on play dates and sleepovers with all the other kids in her class. The complete polar opposite to me, in other words.

And now here we are, living under the same roof together, for the first time since we were teenagers. Except now, instead of feeling old pangs of childhood jealousy towards her, all I can think is, this girl really must be some kind of walking saint. I can’t describe just how hugely grateful I am to her for doing this and for putting up with me, when not many would. Grateful to her for dropping everything to help me out in my hour of need, though I did insist on paying her far more than I ever paid Elka, stressing that this was just a temporary measure till I found someone more permanent. (Not an easy task, given that I’ve been blacklisted by just about every nanny agency in town.)

‘Hi, I’m home. So where’s Lily?’ I ask, still breathless from the mad dash to get back to see her and knowing full well what the answer will be. The house is way too quiet, for starters; course she’s already in bed.

‘Asleep hours ago,’ Helen smiles sweetly up at me from where she’s sprawled out in front of the TV, eating Haagen-Dazs straight from the tub. ‘Oh you should have seen her in the bath! She was so adorable! We had the BEST fun. Then she got into her little pink sleeper suit and insisted on me reading Sleeping Beauty to her … You know that’s her number one story now? And her new thing is that as soon as I’ve told it to her, she has to tell it back to me. She’s completely word perfect, her memory is just incredible you know, almost photographic, just like yours …’

Helen happily chatters on while I stand rooted to the spot, fixing her with a borehole stare. No, I did not know Sleeping Beauty was now Lily’s favourite story. Or that she likes to tell it back to you as soon as you’re finished. I knew none of this; how could I? The one night I can get away from work relatively early to see her, I’m already too late.

‘I really wanted to do all that with her,’ I tell Helen, as a flood of disappointment suddenly makes me irrationally snappy. ‘Just once, just for tonight. I nearly crashed the car I rushed home that fast, I had to spin a pile of stories even just to get away this early …’

‘But it’s half eight at night!’ Helen insists. ‘The poor little thing was exhausted. We’d been to the park earlier today you see, to feed the ducks and the weather was so fine, we stayed there much longer than I’d planned. Then we came back here and had dinner, and of course by then, she was practically falling asleep into her spaghetti hoops. So what else was I to do?’

I give a long, defeated sigh and tell her it’s okay, it’s not her fault. I was just looking forward to seeing my little girl, that’s all. But she knows me of old and knows only too well when to pay no attention to me when I’m ratty from sleep deprivation, so she quickly goes back to her TV show.

‘By the way, Sean called for you today,’ she calls over to me cheerily from the sofa as I tear open the post from the island in the centre of the kitchen.

‘Who the hell is Sean?’

‘Oh you know Sean, he’s the FedEx guy. Left a package on the hall table for you. He says he’s been delivering to you for years. Such a sweet guy; do you know he has a daughter exactly Lily’s age with another one on the way?’

Vintage Helen, getting pally with all around her, entrancing everyone she meets with her natural charm and old-fashioned niceness. In the space of a few days, she’s also befriended the cleaning lady over big, bonding mugs of tea and whinges about the respective men in their lives, not to mention the gardener, who she’s now on first name terms with as well. Whereas the sum total of my knowledge about the cleaner is that her first name is Mary and that she has the permanently disappointed look about her of a woman whose husband left her for someone younger, but not before transferring all his assets into an offshore account. Wait and see though, I bet before the month is out Helen will end up going out on a drunken girlie night in Temple Bar with the cleaner and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she ended getting invited to the gardener’s house for a Sunday roast.

Not that I’m holding any of this against her, it’s just a constant daily reminder of our sibling relationship; I’m permanently cast in the role of bad cop against her perennially popular good cop. I’m the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West to her Glinda, the Good Witch in the meringue dress that everyone loves and gravitates towards and wants to hang around with. This was our central casting as kids and this, it would seem, is how we still are.

Then there’s the fact that she seems to be in constant and daily contact with our mother and feels the need to tell me this all the time. Now every family has someone like Helen; the glue person. The one who tries their level best to keep each one in check and fully informed about everyone else, no matter how much indifference and how many shrugged shoulders they come across. Since she moved in, Helen’s forever passing on little titbits of news, like, ‘Guess what? Mum’s just gone and bought a lovely new patio set for her back garden. The wooden one she had just fell apart after all that rain they had recently in Marbella, and you know how she’s had her eye on a cast iron one for ages now …’

Have I ever had a conversation with my mother regarding patio sets? Didn’t even know she had a back garden. Last time I had a decent conversation with her was over a week ago and even then, she was only ringing up to talk to Lily.

Ahh, Lily. It seems that even a small child isn’t immune to Helen and her Miss Congeniality charm offensive. I’ve never seen anything like it; Lily took one look at this shadowy figure who she vaguely remembered from Christmas dinners, not to mention all the birthday cards and gifts that had been posted up from Cork over the years, and instantly idolised her Auntie Helen, practically from the moment she walked through the front door. Turns out Helen is a born natural with kids, the way she’s a born natural with everyone, and now on the rare occasions when I’m home, all I’ll get from Lily is a rough shove followed by, ‘NO! Not YOU, I want Auntie Helen to read me my storwy. Then Auntie Helen can gimme my bath and put me to bed.’

Don’t get me wrong, of course I could kiss Helen’s feet, I’m that grateful to her, but that doesn’t mean it’s not killing me inside.

No words to describe it, when you suddenly feel unwanted at home. When you’re superfluous under your own roof.

‘No, please don’t worry about rushing home, Eloise,’ Helen’s said to me time and again this week, ‘you don’t have to cancel your meeting and leave the office yet. Lily and I are having such a ball here! We’ve made cupcakes and I’m just teaching her how to ice them now. Stay in work, I know how important that is to you. And don’t worry, we’re all fine here, we’re having great fun!’

So far, the pair of them have been to the park together, the movies, the Build-A-Bear factory at the Dundrum Town Centre; they’ve even had tea parties for all of Lily’s dolls in the back garden and picnics at Sandymount Strand. Everything that I want to do with Lily but can’t.

So if I’m being brutally honest … I’m in equal parts grateful to her, but not a little jealous of her too. Burning childhood memories resurface; the way everyone, absolutely everyone just prefers her to me, she’s a bright light that people can’t help be drawn towards, moth-like. My own daughter, it would seem, included.

‘You know Eloise, I’ve been thinking,’ Helen beams over the top of the sofa at me, turning down the volume of the TV.

‘Umm?’ I mutter distractedly, my head buried deep in the pile of post that I’m still wading through.