Primperfect (10 page)

I am reading a book about a Viking who is a lot more supportive than Fintan. Is it too much to expect that the father of your child be as supportive as a storybook Viking? If not more-so? Though it would be tough to be more supportive than Godric the Bold. He had the local wise woman make balm for the tired feet of his lady-love and everything. My feet are also tired. And yet, I remain balm-less.

Quote from Prim's mum's diary

finally ran out of romance novels left behind by Mum last Christmas so I have been tracking down ones of a similar nature (knights, Vikings, sexy time travel) in charity shops for the past while. I wish that I could travel through time. Apart from the obvious, saving Mum from stupid drunken drivers, I could get up to all sorts of mischief with hilarious consequences. Romance-novel time travel doesn't work like time-machine time travel, though. It's a little different. You don't have control over where you get sent. It's either a mystical love wind, or the curse of a spurned warlock, or those meddling faerie folk that send you wherever, and initially you're all, ‘AGH!' and ‘How will a hard-nosed career woman (albeit with a tragic back-story and secret mushy centre) like me be able to cope in a medieval keep? They don't have electric showers or anything.' But it works out in the end, because you adapt and the handsome warlord who distrusted you initially comes to fall in love with you and then you do kissing and things in an apiary or a solar or somewhere else that is quintessentially of its time. And then something happens to tear you apart, but it all gets sorted. And while that would be fun, I'd really rather have a mum and still be friends with Joel than know

A
LOVE
STRONGER
THAN
TIME
ITSELF,

thank you very much.

I wonder if there's anything I could do to make Fintan more excited about the baby.

Quote from Prim's mum's diary

need, like, a love-potion. But for friendship. Ciara thinks I am in the wrong for blackmailing Joel.

‘It just seems so needy, Prim. Make him chase you.'

‘He is a friend, not a boy.'

‘Nevertheless.'

She does not take her own advice, this Ciara, she is constantly texting me, wanting to hang out and things. Which I love, because she is my good friend. But when we started being friends, she was
always
texting. And it's not like there is another solution to the Joel problem. I mean, I could just wait him out and keep on intermittently apologising, but that hasn't been working so far and I really want to see him.

Ciara actually had an ulterior motive in calling around today. She wants me to go with her to the family planning clinic so she can start planning her family. Her current plan is for it not to happen for at least a decade and a bit. But things with Syzmon have been heating up a little. She's mainly worried about pregnancy, because they're both virgins and you can't catch STDs from being a virgin. Being a virgin is, like, the opposite of how you catch STDs. You can get HIV if you're one, from blood transfusions gone wrong and other things. But you'd be hard pressed to get chlamydia. When I think about things like chlamydia, I feel confident in the fact that I'm (probably) definitely not ready to have sex yet. But even if you're never going to take a ride on the marital love train, as Grandma Lily liked to call it, it is best to be informed about these things, so you can give advice to passing Ciaras.

‘Not that things with Syzmon weren't hot before,' she said, flicking her hair as if daring me to judge her. ‘But I keep getting caught up in stuff and almost going all the way.'

‘How can you do that accidentally?'

‘Stuff gets rubbed against other stuff and things start to seem like good ideas and possibly needs. It's all very passionate and so on and so forth, but I had intended waiting until things were nice and legal until we did
THE DEED
.' She widens her eyes when she says ‘
THE DEED
', emphasising it's deedy importance.

‘You mean wait for marriage?'

‘No. Until my seventeenth birthday. Or shortly afterwards.'

‘Cool. That makes sense. Do you, like, feel ready and stuff?'

Ciara looked out the window, at the garden. There were bees but no birds, which may have been an omen but probably wasn't. (The bees love our lavender plant.) ‘How do you know if you feel ready? I mean, I totally want to sometimes, but other times I'm, like, “
WHAT IF I GOT PREGNANT
?” and “
AAAGGH
”. It would totally ruin my plans to go to millinery school.'

‘Babies are wont to do that. It is a tough one. Do you know what sort of contraception you want?'

‘Well, I kind of want to get the pill, but I can't ask Mam's GP for it, because they are, like, friends and stuff, so it would totally get back to her, which is why it would be better to go to the family planning clinic and get it from someone who is a doctor who doesn't still try to give me lollipops and stickers when I visit. Also, I am
NOT
buying condoms.'

She said this as if buying condoms were up there with selling heroin.

I offered to buy them for her, which was actually pretty generous of me, because I'd get a bit nervous about that sort of thing too. I don't even like buying tampons.

‘Would you? Wow!' she said. ‘I don't know, though. Isn't buying condoms a bit of a
slutty
thing to do?'

‘What? No! Why would you think that?'

‘Well, you have to buy, like, this big box of them. I mean, I think you can get, like, little packs of three, but that's still committing to have sex three times, which is huge. I mean, I'm not even sure I want to once, you know?'

‘Buying condoms does not mean you have to use them, Ciara.'

‘But they'd only go to waste otherwise.'

‘Condoms are
NOT
ham sandwiches. They don't like “go off” or anything if you don't use them within six weeks.'

‘I think buying them is the boy's job.' She nodded her head, the way she sometimes does when she agrees with herself. ‘Only … I don't want to ask Syzmon to buy them, because I don't want him getting any ideas. I want it to be a lovely surprise if I decide to share my body with him.'

Ciara actually says stuff like

I lent her some of Mum's Viking books a couple of years ago and they really took.

‘I wonder if Joel is sharing his body with that Duncan creep?' I tried not to sound like I was making air quotes with my voice when I said ‘sharing his body'. It was really challenging.

‘You are
NOT
to ask him that on Saturday.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because it is private, and you need to woo him back with niceness and not being judgey before he is your friend-you-can-say-anything-to again.'

This is sound advice, but I am not sure if I will be able to follow it. I can't believe Ciara is thinking about having sex when I don't even have a boyfriend. It's so unfair.

Not that I want to lose my virginity, but I would like to have the option, in the context of a loving relationship, of course. I'll most likely end up losing it to Kevin (or someone just as bad) on a pile of coats, while she gets roses and scented candles and a soft and tender playlist she is probably already in the process of compiling.

Mum didn't lose it to Fintan. Which is why reading your mum's old diaries is a mix of

She had a secondary-school boyfriend, who she was with for the first six months of college. His name was Seán, which is a very normal name for a man to have. She broke up with him for not being
THE ONE
. She has this whole bit about wishing she had met him when she was twenty-five or thirty and ready to get married and all that. She was weirdly sure she was going to get married. It is kind of sad she never met anyone she liked enough, apart from Fintan for an ill-advised period preand-post-me.

Sometimes I wish I had stayed with Seán. I wouldn't be happy, but I wouldn't be pregnant either. Probably.

Quote from Prim's mum's diary

um loved me once I came out. I know this for a fact because she has written about it. But I'm kind of hurt by the fact that she wasn't happy about the possibility of a me for a long time. She didn't want a baby. She didn't want to stop being irresponsible and she didn't want to have to worry about a whole other person. She was weirdly OK with the idea of being forever tied to Fintan, until he messed things up. I still don't one hundred per cent get why she wanted to be with him so badly. He is not that cool. Nor is he that handsome. Unless you're into enormous noses and facial topiary. And he was so much older. Perhaps Joel could shed some light on the fancying-older-men thing when I meet up with him.

I miss my mum, always will, but I don't think I realised how complex she was until I started reading her diaries. Three and a half years after she died. You think I would have copped on to it earlier. I mean, she was a mum, she was
my
mum, but she was also a person with intricacies and worries and feelings about things that were grey and blue and green, not black and white. She was as much of a person as I am now. Which is hard to get my head around.

I feel bad that I didn't appreciate her enough. But I was a kid when she died – I mean, I'm still a kid now, more or less. But I was a proper child then. I didn't know. It isn't that I didn't care. I didn't know how hard it was for her. She loved me, but she raised me on her own, for the most part. And babies are very high-maintenance. Like needy fiancées, but more so.

I read the things she wrote, the who she was, the fragments of her self over and over again. Balancing accounts. Lashing interpretations on top of them, as though they were
The Merchant of Venice
, or
To Kill a Mockingbird
, or any other text I had to study. I don't know why I feel compelled to do that. It's not like anything will bring her back.

But I do want her to come back because I could be a better daughter now. I wouldn't be as selfish. I'd help more in the house, listen when she needed me to listen. I feel like she put all this work into me, and now when it's about to pay off, when I'm mature enough to be a proper friend as well as daughter, she's gone. And Dad is here to reap the benefits of the way she raised me. It isn't fair on her (or me). But I still keep reading, because maybe something's hidden in the text. An Easter egg. A clue. A recipe for strange important somethings.