Conversations with Friends(12)

Eventually my mother stripped her gloves off and sat on a lawn chair. I was sitting with my legs crossed, examining the tips of my sneakers.

You seem very impressed with this woman Melissa, she said.

Do I?

She certainly introduces you to a lot of people.

She likes Bobbi more than she likes me, I said.

But her husband likes you.

I shrugged and said I didn’t know. Then I licked my thumb and started scrubbing at a little fleck of dirt on my sneaker.

And they’re rich, are they? said my mother.

I think so. The husband is from a wealthy background. And their house is really nice.

It’s not like you to get carried away with posh houses.

This comment stung me. I continued scrubbing my shoe as if I hadn’t noticed her tone.

I’m not getting carried away, I said. I’m just reporting what their house is like.

I have to say, it all sounds very odd to me. I don’t know what this woman is doing hanging around with college students at her age.

She’s thirty-seven, not fifty. And she’s writing a profile about us, I told you that.

My mother got up from the lawn chair and wiped her hands on her linen gardening trousers.

Well, she said. It’s far from nice houses in Monkstown you were reared.

I laughed, and she offered her hand to help me up. Her hands were large and sallow, not at all like mine. They were full of the practicality I lacked, and my hand fit into them like something that needed fixing.

Will you see your father this evening? she said.

I withdrew my hand and pocketed it.

Maybe, I said.

*



It had been obvious to me from a young age that my parents didn’t like one another. Couples in films and on television performed household tasks together and talked fondly about their shared memories. I couldn’t remember seeing my mother and father in the same room unless they were eating. My father had ‘moods’. Sometimes during his moods my mother would take me to stay with her sister Bernie in Clontarf, and they would sit in the kitchen talking and shaking their heads while I watched my cousin Alan play Ocarina of Time. I was aware that alcohol played a role in these incidents, but its precise workings remained mysterious to me.

I enjoyed our visits to Bernie’s house. While we were there I was allowed to eat as many digestive biscuits as I wanted, and when we returned, my father was either gone out or else feeling very contrite. I liked it when he was gone out. During his periods of contrition he tried to make conversation with me about school and I had to choose between humouring and ignoring him. Humouring him made me feel dishonest and weak, a soft target. Ignoring him made my heart beat very hard and afterwards I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. Also it made my mother cry.

It was hard to be specific about what my father’s moods consisted of. Sometimes he would go out for a couple of days and when he came back in we’d find him taking money out of my Bank of Ireland savings jar, or our television would be gone. Other times he would bump into a piece of furniture and then lose his temper. He hurled one of my school shoes right at my face once after he tripped on it. It missed and went in the fireplace and I watched it smouldering like it was my own face smouldering. I learned not to display fear, it only provoked him. I was cold like a fish. Afterwards my mother said: why didn’t you lift it out of the fire? Can’t you at least make an effort? I shrugged. I would have let my real face burn in the fire too.

When he came home from work in the evening I used to freeze entirely still, and after a few seconds I would know with complete certainty if he was in one of the moods or not. Something about the way he closed the door or handled his keys would let me know, as clearly as if he yelled the house down. I’d say to my mother: he’s in a mood now. And she’d say: stop that. But she knew as well as I did. One day, when I was twelve, he turned up unexpectedly after school to pick me up. Instead of going home, we drove away from town, toward Blackrock. The DART went past on our left and I could see the Poolbeg towers out the car window. Your mother wants to break up our family, my father said. Instantly I replied: please let me out of the car. This remark later became evidence in my father’s theory that my mother had poisoned me against him.

After he moved to Ballina, I visited every second weekend. He was usually on good behaviour then, and we got takeaway for dinner and sometimes went to the cinema. I watched constantly for the flicker that meant his good mood was over and bad things would happen. It could be anything. But when we went to McCarthy’s in the afternoons, my father’s friends would ask: this is your little prodigy, is it, Dennis? And they asked me crossword clues from the back of the paper, or how to spell very long words. When I was right, they clapped me on the back and bought me red lemonade.

She’ll go off and work for NASA, his friend Paul said. You’ll be made up for life.

She’ll do whatever she likes, my father said.

Bobbi had only met him once, at our school graduation. He came up to Dublin for the ceremony, wearing a shirt and a purple tie. My mother had told him about Bobbi, and when he met her after the ceremony he shook her hand and said: that was a grand performance. We were in the school library eating triangular sandwiches and drinking glasses of cola. You look like Frances, Bobbi said. My father and I looked at each other and he gave a sheepish laugh. I don’t know about that, he said. Afterwards he told me she was a ‘pretty girl’ and kissed my cheek goodbye.