Better Together (11 page)

After they returned to Ireland, and as soon as Talia moved to Belfast, Sheridan decided that she’d bite the bullet and visit her parents. She was finding it difficult to sit in the apartment on her own, despite the fact that as soon as she’d come back she’d reminded herself once again that her redundancy should be taken as an opportunity and had set about updating her CV and sending it out. Her key target was the
Irish Journal
, the
City Scope
’s biggest rival, but she tried everywhere else she could possibly think of. However, the net result so far was one request for a colour piece about women who followed football, for a fee that was derisory. The lack of other assignments was scaring her. She hadn’t really expected to be totally without work. She wasn’t sure what to do next. She needed to keep busy, not only so that she felt she was doing something useful with her time, but also so that she didn’t brood about Griff. She was missing him badly and part of her wished she hadn’t told him not to call. She couldn’t help feeling that if he’d ignored her request and phoned, she would’ve come running, because she was feeling desperately lonely without him, especially as Talia wasn’t there to distract her.

Although she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to hear her mother’s advice on job-hunting (Alice was very good at dishing out advice although not quite so good at following it herself – headstrong, Pat would say affectionately, but
rightly so), she couldn’t bear the thought of sitting on her own in the empty flat any longer. She rang Alice and asked if it would be all right to stay for a few days. Alice told her that they’d be delighted to see her.

She threw some clothes into an overnight bag and put it into the boot of her Beetle. Normally she’d think that a four-and-a-half-hour drive was a desperate waste of her time, but time was now something she had plenty of. She got into the car, started the engine and selected her downloaded podcasts of
Fighting Talk
, the BBC sports comedy programme, which she loved and which, until now, she didn’t always have time to listen to.

She stopped off for a coffee near Cashel and spent half an hour reading the
Journal
, mentally editing the sports reports herself though acknowledging that the coverage was good. She was glad to see that a young sprinter she’d tipped as a potential star had set a new personal best at a recent event and been voted Young Athlete of the Month. I’m good at what I do, she told herself. I know I am. A job will happen for me. I just have to stay positive. I just need to keep the winning mentality.

She maintained her positive mood for the rest of the journey and arrived in Doonlara at just after four o’clock. She turned off the town’s main street and continued along the small side road where her parents’ house was located. (Town was, of course, overstating things, she reminded herself. Doonlara was just a jumble of houses, a few small shops, three pubs and a petrol station.) Pat and Alice’s house, about five kilometres past the garage, was a picture-perfect bungalow. It nestled in the shelter of low hills, backed by purple mountains
and with views towards a navy-blue lake that glittered under the afternoon sun. Brightly coloured flowers, in both carefully tended flower beds and glazed ceramic pots, were a striking contrast to the whitewashed walls and slate roof. The front door, beneath an arched porch, was pillar-box red.

Sheridan could hear the barking of the dogs before she rapped on the enormous brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. When her mother opened the door, Sheridan had to pat and greet Cannon and Ball, the two excited terriers, before she could even say hello to the trim woman standing in front of her.

Country life suited Alice, who was wearing a pair of fawn jodhpurs and an emerald-green polo-neck jumper. The vibrancy of the curly red hair, which Sheridan had inherited, had faded over the years, but Alice’s eyes were as clear and sharp as ever and she looked far more energetic than Sheridan herself currently felt. She hugged her mother, then patted the dogs again as she followed Alice into the kitchen at the back of the house.

The sun slanted through the Velux windows in the kitchen roof and gave natural warmth to a room that was surprisingly modern. The floor was tiled in ivory marble and the units were high-gloss gunmetal grey. The table was dark wood, with brushed metal surrounds. Sheridan sat on one of the high-backed chairs and looked through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the garden beyond. Like the front of the house, it was a patchwork of colour against the darker mountains. She could still see the lake too. It was, she thought, spectacularly beautiful. But the space made her feel almost agoraphobic. She was used to being surrounded by buildings and roads. Wide-open country unnerved her.

Alice opened the patio doors and shooed the dogs outside, where they barked in protest but then settled down in a pool of sunlight to gnaw at a couple of ham bones.

‘Your dad’s up at the golf club,’ she told Sheridan as she brought a pot of tea to the table. ‘He’ll be back this afternoon.’

‘Are you still working there?’ Sheridan took a Jaffa Cake from the tin that was already on the table.

‘Of course. It’s a handy number for me, three days a week.’

‘Does it mean you can fiddle his handicap?’ asked Sheridan.

Alice looked shocked and her daughter laughed.

‘Only joking,’ she said.

‘You don’t joke about things like that,’ said Alice sternly. ‘Now, come on, tell me how you’re getting on. Have you sent your CV to everyone who matters?’

‘Of course I have,’ said Sheridan. ‘I’m not stupid, you know.’

‘I never said you were,’ Alice told her. ‘But sometimes people don’t think outside the box about things like this.’

‘Mam, I’m so far outside the box I’m catching pneumonia,’ said Sheridan. ‘There isn’t anyone in the media who hasn’t seen my CV by now. But all the newspapers are struggling because so many people want their news over the internet for free. Even though I’ve also sent my CV to loads of radio stations, I’m useless at broadcasting. Remember when I did that match report for the radio station? The stuff of nightmares!’

Sheridan had been covering a League of Ireland soccer match in Limerick and had been asked to do a report on air for a local station. But she’d stumbled her way through it, uncomfortable with speaking instead of writing, thinking that her words sounded stupid and contrived.

‘It was your first attempt,’ said Alice.

‘And last,’ observed Sheridan. ‘They never asked me again.’

‘Well that doesn’t mean you won’t be asked in the future.’

‘Maybe not, but broadcasting is under the cosh a bit too,’ she told her mother. ‘It’s an industry in a state of flux.’

‘Perhaps you should think of something else.’ Alice got up and took an ironing board from a built-in cupboard. She set it up and plugged in an iron. Then she brought in a basket of dried clothes from the utility room beside the kitchen. ‘That’s what I mean by outside the box.’

‘I’ve been racking my brain,’ said Sheridan. ‘But I’m not sure what else I’m good at.’

‘You’re talking like a loser.’ Alice banged the iron on to a jersey. ‘I can’t believe a daughter of mine is talking like a loser.’

‘Not like a loser,’ protested Sheridan. ‘God knows, I haven’t been brought up that way. But I’ve got to be a realist.’

‘Listen, if I was a realist I wouldn’t have put money on the Doonlara team to beat Killorglin last week,’ said Alice. ‘I wouldn’t have backed Ireland against France in the World Cup qualifiers. I wouldn’t have bought tickets for the All-Ireland final because I’d’ve been afraid Kerry wouldn’t make it.’

‘Ma – I hate to break it to you, but Kerry didn’t win that final. And Ireland lost against France.’

‘But Doonlara beat Killorglin,’ said Alice in satisfaction. ‘And a great game it was too.’

‘One out of three isn’t exactly a storming result,’ remarked Sheridan.

‘The Ireland–France was from the heart, not the head. But I put the money on Kerry before the season even started.
So they had to win a lot of matches to get to Croke Park in the first place. Losing the final was irrelevant in the end.’

‘It’s not the same thing,’ said Sheridan.

‘It’s a winning mentality,’ Alice told her. ‘I have it. Your dad does too. So does Con. And Matt. But you – you’re afraid of losing, and that’s why you don’t always win.’

‘For crying out loud!’ Sheridan looked at her mother in exasperation. ‘Everyone else in the whole world thinks I’m a winner, except you.’

‘Listen to me,’ said Alice fiercely. ‘You’re in competition with everyone else who’s unemployed and you’re trying to win a job and you can’t take any prisoners. You’ve got to go out there and beat off the competition and not be afraid of losing.’

‘I’m not afraid of losing.’

‘Of course you are. You always were.’

‘That’s nonsense.’

‘It’s the truth.’ Alice folded the jersey and started on another.

‘It’s bullshit.’ Sheridan found, to her horror, that her lip was trembling. She certainly wasn’t going to cry in front of her mother. That would mark her as a loser for sure.

‘Watch your language, Sheridan Gray.’ Then Alice’s tone softened. ‘I just want what’s best for you, that’s all. I don’t want you to undersell yourself.’

‘I don’t,’ Sheridan told her. ‘But I can’t work miracles either.’

She brought her bag into the guest room and sat on the bed, staring out of the window at the dark mountains. She knew her mother was trying to be helpful, but sometimes,
she thought wearily, helpful mothers gave you nothing but grief.

When she went back to the kitchen again, Alice had finished the ironing and was sitting at the table, a laptop open in front of her.

‘I’m working on some stuff for the golf club,’ she told Sheridan. ‘I’m nearly finished.’

Sheridan had brought her laptop with her and she opened it too. ‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘I’ll check my emails.’ She was hoping that someone would have contacted her about a job so that she could prove her winning status to her mother, but her inbox contained the usual amount of spam, chain mails and jokes. She busied herself with clearing it out in an effort to look like she was doing something useful.

‘Any job offers?’ asked Alice.

‘Not this time.’

‘We have to come up with a plan,’ Alice told her.

Sheridan said nothing. It wasn’t as though she didn’t have a plan of her own. It wasn’t as though she’d given up trying. She kept her eyes fixed on the screen as her fingers flew over the keyboard. But she was simply hitting random keys and not doing anything useful at all.

Alice made fish pie for dinner and it was ready when Pat finally came home. He left his golf gear at the back of the house and walked into the kitchen in his stockinged feet.

‘Your ma loves her tiles,’ he told Sheridan as he gave her a hug. ‘It’s more than my life’s worth to walk on them with my golf shoes. She never worried about stuff like that in Dublin.’

‘These tiles were very expensive,’ Alice told him, her eyes twinkling. ‘And you’d have them ruined if I didn’t keep an eye on you.’

Pat and Alice joked with each other while Sheridan watched them. There was no doubt that they were still as much in love with each other now as they’d been when they’d married over thirty-five years earlier. She asked herself if it was possible these days to love the same person for such a long time. If she and Griff had married, would they have stuck together for thirty years or more? Of course, she would have gone into it expecting it to last for ever, but how realistic was that? She shivered suddenly. Until that moment she’d been feeling as miserable about losing Griff as she’d felt about losing her job, but now she was relieved. She’d loved him, sure. But did she have ten years’ worth of love for him? Twenty? Thirty? Was breaking up with Griff the first blessing in disguise of her unemployed state?

‘So how’s the job-hunting going?’ asked Pat as Alice served up the fish pie.

Sheridan told him the same as she’d told her mother, and Pat, too, started talking about plans and how to make herself stand out among everyone else who was looking for a job.

‘I do know all this, Dad,’ she said.

‘Yes but you’ve got to put it into practice,’ he told her. ‘Fail to prepare . . .’

‘. . . prepare to fail,’ Sheridan finished. She knew the phrase well. It was one that both her parents had used incessantly when she and her brothers were smaller. The idea had been drilled into them.

‘Success isn’t everything . . .’ Alice continued.

‘. . . you can learn from failure.’ Sheridan completed
another of her mother’s favourite sayings. ‘But you know what, Mam, there was nothing I needed to learn from being made redundant.’

‘You’re having to learn how to fall back on your own resources,’ said Alice.

‘Hum. And that’s good, why?’

‘It’s always good to learn how to fend for yourself,’ Alice said. ‘Your team might let you down but you have to keep going. You have to have a fallback plan. Your flatmate, Talia, did. She was out of the stalls quickly. Smart girl. You should’ve had your eye on the ball like her.’

‘I thought I had.’

‘That won’t happen to you again. And so you’ll know to grab whatever opportunity you get in the future and use it to make a name for yourself again.’

‘I was sure I
had
made myself a name,’ said Sheridan. ‘The problem is that it clearly wasn’t good enough.’

Pat looked thoughtful. ‘You did well at the
City Scope
but you didn’t build on it. If it had been Matt or Con, they’d probably have moved on after landing a few exclusive interviews.’

‘Dad! It was a good job. It was a good paper. It still
is
a good paper. There was no need to move on.’

‘Y’see, you want to get ahead, you want to do well but you’re always a little behind the game,’ said Pat. ‘I don’t know why that is.’

‘Everyone at the
Scope
thought I was competitive and hard hitting,’ Sheridan told her. ‘It’s only in this family that I’m considered soft and useless.’

Neither of her parents rushed to correct her, which made her sigh in exasperation.

‘I’ll get a job,’ she told them. ‘I know I will. When I first went into journalism, I wanted to be a crime reporter. I need to look at those possibilities again. And other areas too. I was concentrating too much on sport, but there’s much more to journalism than that.’