‘It’s a good, healthy cereal,’ he said, looking hurt. ‘It’s a good stomach-settler.’
‘Can we just stop the inquisition? Am I working, am I eating? YesI am and no I would rather chew my own Ugg boots than eat Weetabix. I eat granola. You should know that.’
Michael wasn’t an emotions man. He liked rationality and reason. No crying, slight hysteria or shaky voices. Rosie, being a normal teenager, would display every human emotion in just one conversation, which always had a slightly destabilising and unnerving effect on Michael.
‘I do know that,Rosie,’ he said, a politician’s smile plastered on his face. ‘I just merely forgot your breakfast preferences for one moment. And anyone is allowed to do that from time to time.’ He was desperately trying to bring the conversation back toPolitics Todaybut things were often far moreLoose Women.
‘Now, I was just saying to Mammy here that we should pop into Trinity together. I can show you around…the library, the cafeteria, that kind of thing. My old favourite lecture theatre… Trinity’s hallowed gates.’
‘So you keep saying…’ she said, the slightly terrified look in her eyes reappeared anytime Trinity was mentioned.
‘Next stop for you, Rosie,’ he pressed, ‘is politics. What do you say?’ But before Rosie could answer there was a beep of a horn outside. ‘Right, time to go,’ he said. ‘Meetingin Drogheda. Right,’ he said, clicking his heels together and giving us a salute. ‘I’m off. Had my Weetabix… yourfavourite, Rosie…’
‘Da-aad…’
‘I’m joking,’ he said. ‘But I might bring you back a bumper box of 72 when I’m next home. You will like them… much better than fannying around with muesli…’
Rosie was smiling, despite herself.
‘By the way, Mammy,’ he said. ‘Was that ordinary milk Ijust had?’
‘Supermarket’s finest,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t organic or from goats or anything strange like that.’
‘No... Why?’
‘Just had an idea,’ he said. ‘You don’t get anywhere without ideas.’ He kissed Rosie on the head, gave me a friendly tap on the arm and gathered his briefcase and rushed outside. ‘Remember, lights off!’ he shouted behind him as the door slammed. ‘Standards must be upheld!’
*
The Thomas family was rather different to the Fogarty’s political dynasty bursting with heirs all born to rule. In my family, the only destiny we seemed to follow was having one-daughter. Both my mother, my grandmother and I had just the one girl but Rosaleen, and Nora had their babies out of wedlock. My rebellion was to do it within the conventional confines of marriage.
Rosaleen was an unmarriedmother at a time when it was possibly the most shocking thing anyone could do apart from eat garlic or refuse to go to Mass. When she discovered her pregnancy, she told no one anything. Not a word. Not even Nora’s father who was a boy from back home in West Cork… but already married. She left home, saying she was heading off to Dublin to work, but kept her pregnancy a secret, kept her babyand brazened it out. It takes a tremendous amount of guts to do that, to stare down the gossips and the whisperers and the elbow-nudgers. Force of personality and determination got her through.
Mypaternity was never up for much of a discussion. As far as I know, I was conceived at a music festival so the chances of me discovering who he was were lost in a haze of hallucinogenic substances.Not the most conventional start to my life. But that was Nora. She didn’t do normal.
I thought Nora was going to faint when I told her that I was getting married. To Michael. ‘What?’ She looked horrified and didn’t try to hide her shock. ‘You can’t. Tab, you can’t… he’s…’
‘He’s what?’
‘He’s not like us…’ was all she managed. And she was right. He wasn’t like us, at all. ‘He’s a ProgressiveConservative.’ But I wanted a child and he wanted a wife.
And Nora got over it. Not enough toembraceMichael (he wouldn’t have actually embraced her, anyway, as he always said, with a slight shudder, there was the whiff of Oxfam off her), but enough not to go on about it. Anyway, we all had Rosie to think about now.
But whenever I walked on the pier in Dun Laoghaire, I’d look at the couples,the ones who looked like they’d been married for years and years, the ones brimming with love and lustre, chatting nineteen to the dozen, holding hands, and I would feel a tug of loneliness. I used to have that, once, but life had taken a different direction and Rosie was the centre of my universe. Michael and I, when he was home, didn’t share a bedroom and we had used the fact that he had the nasalcapacity of a jet engine as the reason for his moving to the spare room. Michael and I weren’t perfect, but it wasn’t bad. Certainly notbad enoughto leave.
‘Mum…’
‘Yes sweetheart?’ I said, looking up from the fridge from where I was putting the shopping away.
‘Nothing,’ she said, turning away. ‘Forget it.’
‘No, what is it? Is everything all right?’
This school year hadn’t started well forRosie when her boyfriend, Jake, ended things. And now, with the pressures of exams, the light had gone out of her. It was awful to see. She had even retreated from her best friends, Alice and Meg.
‘Yeah, fine.’ She turned to go.
