You, Me and Other People. Fionnuala Kearney

      Subject: Your mail

      I am SO fed up with your needs. You needed to leave me to shag another woman. Now you need to talk to me. Miss me – you left me! What bloody planet are you on? And shove your ‘x’ directly up your ass. Beth.

      Just as I press send, I hear the front door slam and my heart clenches. Shit. I creep to the door and listen. I’m not ready to see him. All sorts of thoughts skip through my head. Heart thumping, I remember I’ve changed the locks, but it’s only when I hear the footsteps on the stairs being taken two at a time and a telltale ‘Mum?’ that I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I’m sitting down, pressing that spot between my thumb and forefinger, when Meg peers around the door.

      ‘There you are! Should have known! God, Mum, open a window!’ She comes across the room and embraces me, then walks back to the first Velux, pushing it open.

      ‘How can you work? It’s like a coffin in here! Any food in? C’mon,’ she pulls my hand. ‘I’m famished.’

      ‘You’ll be lucky,’ I say, following her downstairs. ‘I was going to food-shop tonight.’ The lie slips easily off my tongue. ‘Why are you home anyway? I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.’

      Meg turns on the stairway and stares at me with Adam’s eyes.

      ‘Look at you. I guess I just knew,’ is her explanation.

      ‘What?’ I’m a bit miffed because, midnight OCD episodes aside, I feel I’m doing pretty well. I tug self-consciously at my worn-out tracksuit, run a hand through my limp hair.

      ‘Tell you what.’ She nods towards my art text box. ‘Give me time to have a shower and freshen up, then take me to Guido’s for supper and I won’t mention how you’re generally behaving weirdly.’

      ‘Deal,’ I say, suddenly very grateful that she’s there.

      ‘I miss him,’ she confesses later over her gnocchi.

      ‘Sweetheart, it’s me he’s stopped loving, not you.’

      The eyes look at me again. ‘Mum, Dad will never stop loving you. It’s just that he loves himself more.’

      Oh, the words of the wise.

      ‘But he loves you the most,’ I add. ‘Never forget that.’

      I can tell she’s trying not to cry, tearing a little piece of garlic bread off every few seconds. It’s like, if she keeps chewing, the tears won’t come.

      ‘I still can’t quite believe it,’ she confesses. ‘Every morning I wake up and think of how he’s behaved and I just shake my head.’

      I nod mine.

      ‘It’s so bloody clichéd. I thought he was better than that.’

      ‘Didn’t we all?’ I sigh, a deep sigh. ‘Eat your food, it’ll get cold.’

      She takes her fork and stabs some gnocchi, raises it to her mouth.

      And, in that moment, watching her, I’m cast back in time to a three-year-old Meg. Her lower lip would tremble, just like it’s starting to now; she’d take a deep breath and she would either howl like a feral vixen or keep the lip-tremble going, stubbornly refusing to cry. Tonight there is no wild sound but the floodgates open anyway. Silent tears slide down her face. She looks away, searching for an escape route to the Ladies and I reach for her hand, clutch it tightly.

      ‘Stay,’ I plead. ‘You’re okay …’ The restaurant only has four other diners and we’re seated far enough away from them. I can feel the taste of my own cries in the back of my jaw. Controlling them, I hand her tissues and whisper, ‘It’s going to be okay.’ The words seem empty and hollow to me. I hope they sound different to her.

      ‘Will you,’ she sniffs, wipes her eyes, ‘will you take him back?’

      The hope in those eyes makes me want to gasp, grab at some extra air to help me come to terms with what her expression means. Despite her strength, despite her obvious anger at her father, all she wants is for this to be over and her family back together again. I want to kill Adam. I want to kill him for doing this to her and to me. I shake my head slowly. ‘I don’t know, Meg, I just don’t know yet.’

      She nods, looks away, places the cooling gnocchi in her mouth and chews slowly. I watch her pierce another piece and repeat. Letting go of her hand, I take my own fork and swirl some spaghetti around its end. The bolognese is garlic heavy and I think about how Adam always shied away from garlic kisses. It feels something like spite when I clear my plate slowly.

      We chat about anything that is nothing to do with Adam and me, or Adam and me and her. Her coursework, her flatmates, her tutors and her shower, which has mould in the tiling grout. Soon her tears have turned to laughter and I smile and she does too. She stands, comes over to my side of the table and hugs me. Tight. No more words are needed. She’s strong. She will be all right and, as long as she’s all right, I will be too.

      Later, after late-night cocoa at home, Meg apologizes again for not staying the night and pulls a jumper on over her T-shirt. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’ve got an important tutorial first thing. You okay?’ I take her in my arms, not an easy feat as she’s a lot taller than me. I stroke her beautiful chestnut curls.

      ‘I’m fine if you are,’ I whisper into their softness.

      ‘The “f” word, Mum. That bad, eh?’

      ‘Fine’ is a swearword in our house, usually meaning, ‘fed-up, insecure, neurotic and emotional’.

      She kisses me, a slight touch of lips. ‘Take care, Mum.’ I want to keep hold of her as we hug, wrap her up in my clothes or shrink her, put her in my pocket for safekeeping. As soon as she leaves, I run to my handbag, remove my notebook and my Dictaphone. As I write the words, I record the melody I’m humming. I call it ‘The F Word’.

       I’m not fine,

       No, I’m not fine this time,

       I can’t even say that word in this hell of mine.

      I close my eyes and positively visualize it performed on a worldwide stage.

       Maybe given time,

       Fine might mean fine,

       But right now it’s early days,

       I hurt in a hundred ways,

       And I’m not fine.

      Climbing the stairs to bed, I yawn – a long, gaping, sleepy yawn, and am so relieved that I crawl fully clothed under the bed covers. In my dreams, Gordon Ramsay is in my bed.

      ‘You can’t call it “The F Word”,’ he says.

      ‘How did you get here?’ I say.

      He doesn’t answer but I have to admit that he looks quite dishy there, his head resting on Adam’s pillow.

      ‘But since you’re here, does the “F” stand for fuck or for fine?’ I lean up on my left elbow. ‘See, around here when you say “fine”, it’s called “The F Word”,’ I explain.

      ‘No,’ he says, raising his head to meet mine. ‘It definitely stands for fuck in our house.’

      ‘But this is my house,’ I pout. In my dreams, my pout is suggestive, my lips dressed in scarlet gloss.

      ‘Who the fuck cares,’ he says, and kisses me. Gordon, it seems, is not averse to my garlic kisses.

       Chapter Six

      Emma has a fourteen-year-old son called Harold. Not Harry – Harold.