Which left me,second-born, to keep the peace in our lopsided family. Keeping up appearances has always been the beating heart of our family. We all had to be suitably dressed for morning Mass on Sunday, where my mother would hold her head high and search out those who had not managed this feat of family management.
Dom once naughtily told Ma that sitting in church didn’t make her religious any more than sitting in the garage made him a car, but she batted that one right back at him and added a cuff round the ear for good measure. Pure steel, that woman is.
‘I’m sleeping badly,’ Dad points out, looking mournful.
I give him a stern look: ‘That’s emotional blackmail.’
‘Ah go on, Marin, she listens to you.’
‘She listens to you, too.’
‘Yes but only for a short while and then she sulks with me. Dom doesn’t notice the sulking: he’s always been immune. I really can’t sleep, you know. I wake up early. That’s a sign of stress: I looked it up.’
‘Fine. Fill me in, then. Why did Dom tell her he was getting a divorce? He washell-bent on getting back with Sue last time I talked to him.’
‘Sue’s moved on. She went out for drinks with an old flame,’ Dad whispers, as if keeping the volume down will make the news easier to impart.
I was getting the picture, finally: my mother has looked down on Sue for years. But now that Sue was moving on, divorce was suddenly in the future and Fr Leonard, very much of the old school of Catholicism, would need CPR if he heard. No wonder there was screaming.
‘OK. Let me at them.’
Dad reached under his couch and retrieved an open box of cheap chocolates. ‘Have a few. Get your blood sugar up.’
‘If she finds these, you’re dead,’ I say.
Ma prides herself on her figure and does not allow treats in the house.
His mouth full of toffee chocolate, Dad grins. ‘I won’t tell if you won’t.’
The kitchen is uncharacteristically messy when I enter to find Dom, barefoot, wearing ratty sweatpants and a jumper, making coffee in an old Moka machine with the remains of a toasted sandwich on a plate.
The diametric opposite is my mother, who is wearing a neattweedy-looking skirt to the knee, beige nylons, sedate heels and one of those pale pink twinsets you see in newspaper special offers. Her hair is sprayed into a helmet of frosted curls which dare not move. She is sitting on a kitchen chair, toe tapping, a china cup in front of her and ismid-diatribe.
‘... You cannot make those vows and then abandon them. New jacket?’ she says, catching sight of me and switching her attention from one child to another in a flash.
Ma’s intonation is practically weaponised: nobody else can endow two words with such a negative meaning. My mother has been criticising my clothing for so long that this latest statement is like water off a duck’s back.
‘Work clothes,’ I say cheerfully.
‘I still think Hilliers should have a uniform,’ she says, reverting to a very old,oft-revisited topic. ‘Something classy, a heather tweed, maybe with a plain blazer. Black makes you look old. But a uniform...’
She angles her head a little as if to imagine this dream, heather tweed outfit on me. ‘Or maybe not. Tweed does add weight around the middle if one isn’t careful.’
Fantasy Marin would tell my mother that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones – my mother is at least two stone overweight – but Real World Marin knows better.
‘We can’t all have your figure, Ma,’ I say, again cheerfully. Because when you deliver a whopper of a lie like this you have to throw in a bit of toadying.
‘I know,’ says Mum, smoothing down her tweedy skirt.
I often think the problem with my mother is that she has a very limited sense of self awareness. Her focus is always dedicated towards looking at other people’s flaws, never her own. I feel sure there is a whole segment of psychoanalysis devoted to this but even when I readPsychologiesmag, I still can’t find the bit to help.
‘Hi, Dom,’ I say, going over and patting him briefly on the back. ‘Is there enough in that Moka for another cup?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ he says, laid back as ever.
Up close, he has several five o’clock shadows and yet still looks recklessly handsome. All the girls loved Dom at school. But my mother clearly doesn’t right now, hence the pained text from Dad begging me to drop in.
Dom has made an almighty mess of the kitchen constructing a toasted cheese sandwich and he stinks. I can see why my mother gets annoyed. But then, she smiled when Dom did this as a young man. Said it was his wife’s job to tidy up after him – what does she expect?
