Further Under the Duvet (38 page)

Roller-blade
, planted itself in her head. Immediately she told herself not to be so ridiculous. How could she go roller-blading?

But why not? What else was she going to do until bedtime? And despite all the events of the evening it was still only eight-thirty. She pulled on her leggings, even though they had a tear on one knee, and ran across the sand. She was surprised to find how uplifted she was by whizzing back and forth at high speed on her skates. It had something to do with pride in what a good roller-blader she was – she really was excellent, considering this was only her second time doing it. Her sense of balance was especially wonderful.

The little boy Tod who had been there the previous night was there again, with his long-suffering mother. Bethany was red-faced and breathless from having to run and hold onto Tod while he cycled up and down the same six yards of boardwalk and Ros gave her a sympathetic smile.

Then Ros went back to her room and against all expectations managed to sleep. When morning came she woke up and went to work, where, with a deftness that left the Los Angeles company reeling in shock, she negotiated a thirty per cent discount when she’d only ever planned to ask for twenty. Blowing smoke from her imaginary gun, she gave them such firm handshakes that they all winced, then she swanned back to the hotel to pack. Successful mission or what?

Bib was in agony. What was he going to do? Was he going to England with Ros, or home to his own planet? Though he’d grown very fond – too fond – of Ros, he had a feeling
that somehow he just wasn’t her type and that revealing himself, in all his glorious, custard-yellowness would be a very, very bad idea. It killed him not to be able to. In just over two days he’d fallen in love with her.

But would she be okay? She
thought
she was okay, but what would happen when he left her and there was no one to shore up her confidence? Would she go back to Michael? Because that wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t do
at all
.

He worried and fretted uncharacteristically. And the answer came to him on the evening of the last day.

Ros had a couple of hours to kill before her night flight, so instead of moping in her room, she ran to the boardwalk for one last roller-blading session. Bib didn’t have anything to do with it – she decided all on her own. He’d have preferred a few quiet moments with her, actually, instead of trundling alongside her trying to keep up as she whizzed up and down, laughing with pleasure.

Bethany and Tod were there again. Time after time, Bethany ran behind the bike, holding tightly as Tod pedalled a few yards. Back and forth on the same strip of boardwalk they travelled, until, unexpectedly, Bethany let go and Tod careened away. When he realized that he was cycling alone, with no one to support him, he wobbled briefly, before righting himself. ‘I’m doing it on my own,’ he screamed with exhilaration. ‘Look, Mom, it’s just me.’

‘It’s all a question of confidence.’ Bethany smiled at Ros.

‘I suppose it is,’ Ros agreed, as she freewheeled gracefully. Then crashed into a jogger.

As Bib helped her to her feet, he was undergoing a realization.
Of course
, he suddenly understood. He’d been Ros’s
training wheels and, without her knowing anything about it, he’d given her confidence – confidence to do her job in a strange city, confidence to break free from a bullying man. And just as Tod no longer needed his mother to hold his bike, Ros no longer needed Bib. She was doing it for real now, he could feel it. From her performance in her final meeting to deciding to go roller-blading without any prompting from Bib, there was a strength and a confidence about her that was wholly convincing.

He was happy for her. He really was. But there was no getting away from the fact that the time had come for him to leave her. Bib wondered what the strange sensation in his chest was and it took a moment or two for him to realize that it was his heart breaking for the very first time.

LA airport was aswarm with people, more than just the usual crowd of passengers.

‘Alien-spotters,’ the check-in girl informed Ros. ‘Apparently a little yellow man was spotted here a few days ago.’

Aliens!
Ros thought, looking around scornfully at the overexcited and fervent crowd who were laden with Geiger counters and metal-detectors.
Honestly! What are these people like?

As Ros strapped herself into her airline seat, she had no idea that her plane was being watched intently by a yard-high, yellow life-form who was struggling to hold back tears. ‘Big boys don’t cry,’ Bib admonished himself, as he watched Ros’s plane taxi along the runway until it was almost out of sight. In the distance he watched it angle itself towards the sky, and suddenly become ludicrously light and airborne. He watched
until it became a dot in the blueness, then traipsed back through the hordes of people keen to make his acquaintance, to where he’d hidden his own craft. Time to go home.

Ros’s plane landed on a breezy English summer’s day, ferrying her back to her Michael-free life. As the whining engines wound down, she tried to swallow away the sweet, hard stone of sadness in her chest. But, even as she felt the loss, she knew she was going to be fine. In the midst of the grief, at the eye of the storm, was the certainty that she was going to cope with this. She was alone and it was okay. And something else was with her – a firm conviction, an unshakeable faith in the fact that she wouldn’t be alone for the rest of her life. It didn’t make sense because she was now a single girl, but she had a strange warm sensation of being loved. She felt surrounded and carried by it. Empowered by it.

Gathering her bag and book, slipping on her shoes, she shuffled down the aisle towards the door. As she came down the plane’s steps she inhaled the mild English day, so different from the thick hot Los Angeles air. Then she took a moment to stand on the runway and look around at the vast sky, curving over and dwarfing the airport, stretching away for ever. And this she knew to be true – that somewhere out there was a man who would love her for what she was. She didn’t know how or why she was so certain. But she was.

Before getting on the bus to take her to the terminal, she paused and did one last scan of the great blue yonder. Yes, no doubt about it, she could feel it in her gut. As surely as the sun will rise in the morning, he’s out there. Somewhere…

First published in
That’s Life
magazine, summer 1999.

Q
.
Dear Mammy Walsh, you seem like a devout, respectable woman, with very high standards, yet you swear like a trooper. I have often heard you use the expletive ‘fecking’. I don’t understand.
Byron, Auckland

A
. Byron pet, you’re not Irish, are you? Let me explain. ‘Fecking’ is a lovely Irish word our Lord gave us when we’re irate enough to want to say ‘fucking’ but we’re in polite company. It’s barely a swear word at all. ‘Fecking’ is a beautiful, effective catch-all phrase that you could say to a bishop. As a result I almost never employ ‘fucking’. Rarely, very rarely. Like the time when Margaret arrived home to tell me she’d left her droopy-drawers husband, and even then I waited until I was in my bedroom and only said it to Mr Walsh. (I believe the exact phrase I used was, ‘For fuck’s fucking sake, why can’t just fucking one of my fucking daughters stay fucking well married for five fucking minutes?’ And Mr Walsh replied, ‘Fucked if I know.’ And then I said, ‘No fucking need for language like that.’ Then we had a little laugh because you have to under those sorts of circumstances.) I hope this clears the fecking matter up for you.

Q
.
Dear Mammy Walsh, my problem is that I’m addicted to chocolate. I have to have something every afternoon at around
three-thirty (usually a Hazelnut Caramel or a Biscuit Boost). I mean, I HAVE to have it. Then, coming home from work, if I’m a little later than usual and hungry, I sometimes buy something for the walk from the bus stop to my flat. (Often a Time Out or a Twirl.) But the biggest problem of all is with boxes of chocolates. Once I open a box, I can’t stop. I literally can’t. I keep saying, this will be the last one but it never is and the next thing you know the box is empty apart from the coffee cremes and those yukky strawberry ones that – weirdly – are my sister’s favourite, but I hate them. Sometimes we are given boxes of chocs at work and they’re handed around and everyone takes one and goes back to work, but I keep thinking of the open box with all the uneaten sweets and can’t concentrate on anything. Last week, under such circumstances, I sneaked the box into the stationery cupboard and ate eleven – I counted –
eleven
chocolates in under five seconds. That really worried me. I do have some abandonment issues from my childhood and I wonder if I should see an addiction counsellor.

Fran, Newcastle

A
. I am sick to the back teeth of all this addiction stuff. If you’re not addicted to shoes, you’re addicted to drink and if you’re not addicted to drink you’re addicted to Pringles. In my day, Fran, you didn’t have ‘issues’ (unless it was of
Woman’s Way
magazine) or twelve-step programmes or ‘co-dependence’ (whatever that is when it’s at home). Nowadays you want to be addicted to everything and it’s only because it’s fashionable. Not so long ago it was fashionable for you girls to be lesbians and before that it was vegetarians. Chocolate is lovely, everyone knows that. Only a ‘weirdo’ doesn’t love it. We have a tin in our house with a great selection in it, and
I myself enjoy a fun-sized Twix with my cup of coffee every morning, and most days after lunch Mr Walsh and I share a KitKat. (Not the chunky kind, the old-fashioned, four-finger ones. I actually bought them for Helen; she was in bed with a throat infection and asked me to get her KitKats when I went to Dunnes. However, being Helen, she didn’t specify that it was actually KitKat Chunkies she wanted and when I arrived home with the non-chunky variety, she nearly ate the head off me. It was so bad that Mr Walsh got back into the car and drove around till he found the chunky ones. Since then we have been working our way through the non-chunky ones and very nice they are too.)

It’s so peaceful down here. Muffled and calm, and empty, empty, empty. No one but me. Countless fathoms of empty air above me is another world, the one I came from. I’m not going back.

Not that that’s stopping them. My husband, my parents, my sister and my friends are determined to make me come round. Someone told them that people in a coma respond to stimulation, that hearing is the last sense to go, that music and conversation and the voices of my loved ones might haul me up from the depths.

They have me fecking well badgered.

They’re nearly in competition over it, showing up at my hospital room, day and night, telling me the deathly dull minutiae of their day, from the dreams they had last night to how many red lights they broke on their way to work this morning, determined that they will be the first one to reach me. Or, worse still, playing music that they insist is my favourite but so isn’t. It’s the stuff
they
like. They can’t help it; it’s the rule; it’s why people always buy presents for others that they’d like themselves.

The way Chris, my husband, insists I like Coldplay. I don’t. He’s the one who likes them, but persists in buying their CDs for me. But I see no need to disillusion him, it’s
only a small thing. The music I really love (seventies disco, for the record) is in my car because driving around on my own is the only time I can be myself.

My dad, mum and sister Orla have just arrived. Orla launches into a complicated account of a blow-drying disaster at the hairdressing salon she runs, where some woman said she was going to sue them for giving her whiplash of the eye with her fringe. Then Dad and Mum give me a blow-by-blow account of a film they’ve just been to see. I have a strange, sad little feeling that they only went so they’d have something to talk to me about – half-confirmed when Dad suddenly sighs, ‘Is there any point to this? Do you think she hears us at all?’

Yes, Dad, I can hear you more than you’d think. It’s coming from far away, like from a distant galaxy, but I can still hear you.

‘We’ll try a bit of James Last,’ he suggests. ‘She loves that.’

You mean
, you
love it, Dad
.

‘We used to dance to it every Christmas,’ he says. ‘Me and her. She loved it.’

Dad, I was six then. It’s nearly thirty years ago
.

A muzaky version of ‘Waterloo’ fills the room. Must be the Abba medley.

Christ, if they’re wanting me to return to reality, they’re going the wrong way about it
.

Gratefully I slip below the surface, down, down, down, down, towards the fathomless bottom. It’s so deeply restful here, like lying for a week on a beach on a perfect tropical
island, with nothing to worry me, nothing to fear. Feeling nothing, nothing, nothing.

Chris, my husband, is here a lot. He sits very close to me and cries, Coldplay whining quietly in the background. He always smells nice and while he’s here he triumphs over the decay and death of the hospital air. He talks incessantly, in a desperate voice. Today, he’s saying, ‘Laura, remember the first time we met? On the flight to Frankfurt? And I wanted to sit by the window to see the Alps, and you wouldn’t give up your seat? I thought you were the feistiest woman I’d ever met. And you said no matter how feisty I thought you were, you were still going to sit beside the window.’

Yes, Chris, I remember
.

‘And remember when you took me shopping for my interview suit, and you got me into all kinds of stuff I’d never have worn before? We had such a laugh.’

Yes, Chris, I remember
.

‘Please come back, Laura, oh please come back.’ And then – I presume no one else is around – he whispers right into my ear, ‘I’m so sorry, Laura, I love you so much, I’m so very, very sorry. I’ll make it up to you, just please come back. I’ll do whatever you want.’

You could knock off the Coldplay for a while, I think.

But it doesn’t matter. I’m going nowhere. I like it down here.