‘I ran into Mrs Hayes from across the road, Jessica,’ she said to me over brekkie the other day, when she was in one of her better moods, ‘and she was wondering why you still haven’t called in to see them all yet? Hannah’s just had another baby you know. Apparently herself and the article she married have moved into a house only just a few streets away. And you know that brother of hers, Steve, has been back from the States for a few years now. I don’t know where he’s living these days or what he’s at, but apparently he heard you’re back here again and wants to come and see you.’
My heart sank. Last thing I’d be able to do, go out and face people. Particularly ones who I used to be friends with in times gone by, but then drifted away from. Far too many explanations and apologies involved. Sorry, but I can’t do it. No energy. Waytoo much to ask.
It’s interesting to hear that Steve is back in town though. Suddenly I get a flashback to when Hannah and I were in school together and I was permanently hanging around their house. He was older than us by about three years and when we were about fifteen or so, Hannah always swore he had a crush on me, backed up by the fact he’d go bright purple in the face and his stammer would get far worse if I as much as said hi to the poor eejit. He used to call here to do odd jobs for us too: mowing the lawn and general handy work, that sort of thing. But he stopped coming after a while, not only on account of how horrible Maggie and Sharon were to him, but because Joan rarely, if ever, remembered to pay him.
‘Oh, I know what Steve Hayes is doing,’ Sharon piped up, between gobbling down mouthfuls of leftover pizza, which she always microwaves the morning after the night before. ‘He’s playing in a band now. They’re called The Amazing Few and I hear they’re shite. Bono’s job is safe.’
‘Don’t say shite, say manure,’ said Joan.
‘Jeez, excuse me, your highness. Manure.’
‘How you do know all this about him anyway?’
‘He comes into Smiley Burger for the Smiley Fries.’
‘How can he be in a band with that awful stammer?’
‘The stammer’s gone now. Anyway, he’s the guitarist. He doesn’t have to sing. Oh and by the way, Ma, if he does call here, for fuck’s sake don’t let him in. We still owe him money.’
Anyway, those are the good days in Joan-land. Other days, it’s frost over Whitehall and she’ll nearly cut the snot off you for even daring to ask her something as innocuous as whether she enjoyed herself last night. Once I even made the cardinal mistake of asking her if there was a good crowd at the bingo the night before? ‘I was at bridge,not bingo,’ she hissed back at me. Even though I happen to know that not only is she a regular at the bingo, but she’s always winning cash prizes too. But bear in mind that underneath the over-polished veneer this is a woman well in touch with her inner shrew. With the result that I constantly feel like I’m treading on eggshells with her. In a banana skin factory. In a hurricane.
Sometimes, on the nights when she’s been out, she’ll teeter home on her high heels with bags of chips fresh from the chipper for everyone, brimming over with good humour, all chat and gossip about who’s making moves on who, who got the most drunk, who got barred down the local at one of her ‘wine tasting’ soirées. Other times, she’ll thunder in, having, I can only guess, drunk enough to knock the pennies off the eyes of a dead Irishman, and clatter her handbag down so loudly on the hall table that the ornamental elephants on top of the TV all rattle. Then she’ll pick a row out of thin air with whatever unfortunate happens to be sitting nearest to her on the sofa.
‘Look at the bloody useless state of the three of you,’ was one particular gem she spat out at us last weekend. ‘It’s a Saturday night and not a fella to show between the lot of you.’
Well, it was all I could do to throw her a dead-eyed look. Because my survival mechanism in this house is to never, ever let the taunts get to me. And believe me, there are many…Anyway, her eye caught mine and she back pedalled a bit, realising what she’d just said.
‘I’m leaving you out of this, Jessica, on account of you getting so spectacularly dumped only recently and on the principle that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’
‘Where did you get that quote from, Ma?’ asked Sharon, sucking on a fag. ‘OKmagazine?’
‘I don’t know who said it and I don’t care. Celine Dion or someone. But my point is, here’s Jessica going around the place like the zombified dead because she can’t figure out how to hang on to her fella—’
‘Joan,’ I interrupted, not sure how much more of this I was able for in, shall we say, my frail emotional state. ‘I’d leave it there if I were you. Or else…’
‘Or else what?’ Maggie sniped across the room at me. ‘Or else you’ll trash her in your memoirs?’
‘I was going to say, “Or else I might start howling over the TV, thus interrupting your enjoyment of this episode of Little Britain,which you’ve only seen about two hundred times before,” but what the hell, yours is better.’
Like most bullies, Maggie is always bested when you give back as good as you get. Tell you what though, it sure as hell sharpens your wits just being in the same airspace as her. The only downside is that I’m fast becoming every bit as horrible as her.
‘So what I want to know is,’ Joan continued on with her rant, turning to glower at Maggie and Sharon, ‘why can’t you bloody useless pair get your arses off the sofa for a change and start acting like normal young ones? Why can’t one of you come home married or engaged or at least pregnant? Look at Mrs Foley across the road, with seven grandchildren already and only one of her daughters ever got married and even she’sseparated now. But at least hers are out knocking around with fellas at night instead of sitting in staring at the telly night in, night out. Plenty of other mothers would have a seizure if their daughters had boyfriends staying overnight in the house. Me? I’d gladly cook up fried breakfasts for them the next morning if I thought at least one of you was getting a decent shag every now and then. For feck’s sake, when I was your age I had buried your father and was already back out dating again…’ She was working herself up to a crescendo by then as we all stared dully at her, waiting on the grand finale. ‘Why in the name of God,’ she snapped, ‘didn’t I have girls who took after me? Or better yet, why didn’t I have sons? Look at the pair of you; the elder disappointment and the younger disappointment.’
I couldn’t help noticing that neither of her daughters reacted to this tirade; their eyes never as much as flickered away from the TV. Which made me think that this must be a regular occurrence in this house. Then the minute Joan was out of the room, Maggie, queen of the one-line put-down, piped up, ‘As soon as she dies, I’m burying her in a drawer.’
‘As soon as she dies? Are you kidding me?’ said Sharon. ‘That one will outlive Styrofoam.’
Which neatly brings me to Sharon. Right then. Now while she’s every bit as silent and grunty as Maggie, stop the presses, but I did happen to make an interesting discovery about her only last week. One of the many jobs on my To Do list was to give her bedroom a good dust, polish and hoover, so up I went at a convenient gap after Judge Judyfinished and before Oprahstarted. She now sleeps in what was my old room, so it was beyond weird seeing it as it is now, decorated in Joan’s OTT taste, all Laura Ashley flowery patterns and matching bedspreads that nearly make you feel like you’re on hallucinogenic drugs. Anyway, I was just about to start dusting the shelves and was trying hard not to gape at a particularly horrible photo of Sharon and Maggie taken when they were about six and seven, where they’re dressed identically and look exactly like the two little girls from The Shining.But then something else caught my eye: Sharon’s entire DVD collection is made up of romantic movies. Every single one of them. Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sallyall here. Plus she has a DVD of just about every film that Hugh Grant has ever made, even the really shite ones. Then, when I get to her bedside table, I find it’s stuffed full of romance novels. Each one of them pretty well thumbed too, I can’t help noticing. Mills & Boon books with saccharine titles like The Duke and I,Barbara Taylor Bradford, there’s even a few Danielle Steels in there.