‘A payment arrangement?’ I say, temporarily stunned out of my deadened stupor. ‘Emm…sorry to state the obvious, Judy, but payment from what exactly? I have nothing.’
‘Come on, you must have valuable items you could possibly sell? When you were earning, did you invest in paintings? Jewellery? Anything?’
I’m too embarrassed to tell her that the only investments I ever made were in handbags/shoes/designer clobber etc, so instead I just focus on dividing the snotty Kleenex that’s lying on my lap into half, then quarters, then eighths and not bursting into tears. Yet again.
‘Jessie,’ she says, softly, ‘you have to understand that I’m trying to help you as much as I can. And I want you to let me know if there’s anything else that I can do for you.’
‘You could lend me the bus fare home.’
‘Please, be serious.’
‘I was being serious.’
‘What I meant by that was, do you have any assets at all which I could liquidise for you? Something that would give you a cash injection to get you through this?’
Me? Assets? For a second I want to laugh. I’m a live now, pay later kind of gal.
‘Jessie, I hate bringing up a distasteful subject but needs must I’m afraid. When your father passed away, didn’t he leave you anything at all?’
‘No,’ I mutter dully. ‘Poor Dad had nothing to leave. Well, apart from the house that is.’
Her eyes light up.
‘He left you a house? Explain, please?’
‘Nothing to explain. Dad left our family home equally to my stepmother and me. That’s all.’
‘So this would be the house that you grew up in?’
‘Yup.’
‘And he left it to be divided fifty-fifty between both of you?’
‘Ehhhh…yeah.’
‘So, all this time, you’ve been part-owner of a house and you never told me?’
Swear to God, the woman’s eyes look like they’re about to pop across the room like champagne corks. ‘And was it sold? Is it rented out?’
‘No, my stepfamily still live there. The three of them. But I have absolutely nothing to do with those people and they’ve nothing to do with me. Trust me; it’s an arrangement that suits all of us.’
‘But you’re the legal owner of half of this property.’
‘Judy, I’m not with you. What do you suggest I do here? Turf them all out and sell the place from under them? They’d get a hit man after me. You have no idea what these people are like; they’d have me knee-capped. This is their home.’
‘You needed somewhere to stay, didn’t you? Well here’s the answer staring you in the face.’
For a second I look at her, my mouth I’m sure forming the same perfect ‘O’ that the kids do in the Bisto commercial.
‘Jessie, welcome to the wonderful world of “Got no choice”.’
Chapter Six
It’s like a mantra with me the whole of the next day: I have no choice, I have no choice. I. Have. No. Choice. And in fact, if I don’t get a move on, chances are I’ll come home to find all my stuff in cardboard boxes outside the security gates, the locks changed and new people already living there. All of which fits in beautifully with the recurring theme of my life right now; when you’ve got everything, you’ve got everything to lose.
It’s late Saturday afternoon and I’m still in bed, paralysed. Praying that at this exact moment Sam is doing the same thing. That he’s dead on the inside too. Despondent. Missing me. Willing himself to swallow his pride, pick up the phone and beg me to get back with him.
I’ve been practically a ‘Rules Girl’ since our last, harrowing conversation and by that I mean I’ve only texted him approximately a dozen times and left around eight voice messages on his mobile. Per day, that is.
TV is my only friend, but as I’m avoiding the news for obvious reasons, I stick to the History Channel where there’s bound to be nothing on that’ll only upset me more. An ad comes on where they quote Buddha saying that all suffering stems from failed expectations. Yup, sounds about right to me. Next thing, out of nowhere, there’s a massive, urgent walloping on my hall door downstairs, which my first instinct is to ignore, but then it flashes through my mind, Suppose it’s Sam?Standing there with a huge bouquet of flowers and a speech all prepared about what a complete moron he’s been? I dive out of bed like I’ve just had an adrenaline shot to the heart and race downstairs, still in my pyjamas. Course, it’s not Sam at all though. It’s the estate agent, with a middle-aged-looking couple standing on either side of him like twin bodyguards, wanting to view the house. The estate agent is super-polite and says he’s mortified for disturbing me, but his implication is clear; just disappear for the afternoon and let people who can actually afford to live here get a once-over of the place in peace.
Which is how, about an hour later, I end up back in our humble little corporation estate in Whitehall, on Dublin’s Northside. My first time back to the house since I was eighteen, all of eleven years ago. I’m absolutely dreading what lies ahead and at the same time, so punch drunk by all the body blows I’ve taken in the last week, that the part of me that’s numb just takes over everything; all bodily functions like walking down streets and holding conversations without crying. Anyway, like I said, where I come from is not posh. Nor, from what I can see so far, has much of it changed since I used to live here. It’s basically 1950s corpo-land that’s so close to the airport, you can actually see the wheels going up and down on the bellies of all overhead flights. It also gets so deafeningly noisy at times that you feel like you could be living on the near end of a runway. But it just so happens that deafening noise suits me right now. As does anything that drowns out the loop that’s on eternal long play inside my head: dumpedhomelessjob-lessdumpedhomelessjoblessdumpedhomelessjobless…etc., etc., etc., repeat ad nauseam.
The house is right at the very end of a cul-de-sac, which means that when I get off the bus, I have to do the walk of shame down the whole length of the street, alone, unprotected and totally exposed. Which, I know, makes it sound like I come from Fallujah Square and it’s not that I’m worried about broken bottles or other random missiles being flung at me; no, it’s the kids on this street you’ve got to watch out for. They’re complete savages and their cruelty knows no bounds. Plus, as it’s a warm, balmy evening, they’re all out swarming round the place like midges. Sure enough, right across the street, there’s a gang of them led by a boy of about ten, a dead ringer for the kid in The Omen,all harassing someone I can only presume is a Jehovah’s Witness making door to door calls.
‘You says there’s no Our Lady, you says there’s no Our Lady!’ they’re chanting at the poor gobshite, hot on his heels. I pull the baseball cap I’m wearing down even lower over my forehead and pick up my pace a bit, head down at all times. But just then an elderly neighbour out doing her hedges spots me.
‘Jessie Woods? Mother of God, it isyou!’
Shit. Caught. And by a neighbour who’s known me ever since I was a baby, worse luck. ‘Oh, hello, Mrs Foley.’
Right then, stand by for the sideshow. And sure enough, Mrs Foley yells excitedly over at another pensioner who’s busy doing the brasses on her front door. ‘Mrs Brady? Would you look who it is! Jessie Woods herself, as I live and breathe! She’s come home!’
‘Suffering Jesus, I don’t believe it,’ says Mrs Brady, clutching her chest, then abandoning the hall door and waddling over to Mrs Foley’s front gate.
Nononononono, you see, this is exactly what I wanted to avoid. The thing about our street is that it’s considered rude to walk past a neighbour without having at least a ten-minute chat about the most intimate details of your private life. God, the difference between life here and life in Dalkey, where my house – sorry, my ex-house – is. Over on that side of town, I couldn’t even tell you who my neighbours are. Everyone lives behind high security gates and apart from seeing the odd four-wheel-drive zipping in and out, you wouldn’t have a clue who’s living next door to you. There were always rumours flying around that Bono and Enya lived locally, but you’d never, ever get a glimpse of them out buying cartons of milk, Lotto tickets or similar. There was a Southside snobbery at play too; even if you met people locally, say in Tesco’s, they were all far too cultured and sophisticated and up themselves to even admit that they recognised me from TV.