A Very Accidental Love Story. Claudia Carroll

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.

      ‘Lily still hasn’t stopped talking about her dad you know, it’s become almost like an obsession with her.’

      This, by the way, is delivered with a look that might as well say, ‘if you were around more often, you’d know.’

      ‘Oh come on, not this again …’

      ‘Yes, this again. You have to listen to me, Eloise. It’s the first thing she talks about when she wakes up every morning, last thing she asks me about before I put her to bed. When am I meeting him, where is he, have you found him yet, where are you looking … the poor little thing’s not letting it drop. And to be honest, I don’t think this is something that’s just going to go quietly away all by itself, like you’d thought.’

      Okay, so now she has my attention.

      ‘So if you think about it,’ Helen goes on, pausing to dump the now empty tub of ice cream on the coffee table in front of her, then licking every single last dribble of chocolate sauce off the back of the spoon. ‘Would it be such a terrible thing if we did a bit of detective work and tracked him down? I mean, I’d be more than happy to make all the phone calls and do all the work for you. I know how busy you are, but trust me, you wouldn’t have to lift a finger. I’d report back to you at every stage and I wouldn’t do a thing without your say-so …’

      I stand stone still and throw her a look so icy that it could freeze mercury. At least, that’s what I hope it conveys. Lately Seth Coleman has been saying behind my back that my glacial stares, once so terrifying, are now starting to make me look a bit constipated.

      ‘I mean … it absolutely goes without saying …’ she hastily