‘You okay?’ I ask.
‘As much as any of us,’ she replies, taking another swig followed by another grimace. I’m about to ask her what’s going on, but she has lifted my phone and is scrolling my Spotify playlist with the intensity of a detective studying fingerprints.
‘Ah, this will do,’ she says as the opening bars of Salt-N-Pepa’s ‘Shoop’ start to blast through the car. Niamh is immediately lost in rapping and singing along.
‘Come on, Becs!’ she says, urging me to join in.
I push my concerns about her to one side, telling myself I’ll circle back to them later, and join in – the words flowing effortlessly. It’s like I’m back in the nineties and everything is simple and easy again.
‘How do I remember all the words to this, but this morning I couldn’t remember the word “handcuffs”?’ I ask, and Niamh raises an eyebrow and gives me a cheeky smile.
‘What on earth were you at this morning that you needed to be remembering the word for handcuffs? Is there saucy gossip you should be sharing with me?’
‘I wish! Sadly no. I was watching the news and they were showing a perp walk. The arrestee was cuffed and had his arms twisted so far up his back that it looked like he was about to dislocate his shoulder. I commented on it to Adam – but I had a complete brain fart when it came to the word for cuffs. The best I could do was “wristy-things”.’
Niamh honks with laughter.
‘I had myself convinced I was succumbing to early-onset dementia,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t funny.’
‘Bloody menopause!’ Niamh says. ‘Scrambling our brains. Messing up our lives.’
‘But not enough that we don’t remember that Salt’s – or is it Pepa’s? – weakness is “men”. I suppose that’s something. You never know when you’re going to be asked some nineties RnB trivia to get you out of a tricky situation.’
I’m grinning and enjoying rapping very badly along with the music, stepping it up a gear when the song ends and is replaced with ‘Whatta Man’.
‘Absolute tune!’ Niamh declares and we stutter and rhyme our way through it. There’s not much as sad as two forty-something women with strong Derry accents rapping their way through some of their favourite songs of their youth. Given our performance, I’m pretty sure Lin-Manuel Miranda will not be calling us up any time soon to ask us to step in as understudies inHamilton. It’s worth noting, however, that Hercules Mulligan was originally from Northern Ireland, so if Mr Miranda wanted an authentic accent for him, I could absolutely do that. The rapping would be rubbish, mind, but the accent would be on point.
It feels so nice to just embrace this little bit of silliness. So nice, in fact, that I can easily keep my creeping concerns about Niamh towards the back of my mind. She seems happy now, after all. As long as I can stop her getting absolutely shit-faced before we reach the campsite, it should be okay.
So I choose to metaphorically bury my head in the sand a little longer and just keep singing as we head towards Laura’s house to pick her up.
18
YURTS SO GOOD
It’s dark, and thankfully dry, by the time we reach the glamping site. Niamh is more than a little tipsy, and Laura is a little giddy too, having helped Niamh get through her bottle of Fanta. I have a feeling there will be no fires started by these two tonight and they’re likely to crash as soon as we reach our accommodation. It’s not ideal and even though it’s nice to see them enjoying themselves, I can’t help but feel a little annoyed. They know what this gig means to me. They must know I want to put a professional foot forward.
I remind myself that they are not working here. I invited them away to get a break. I can hardly start laying down the law.
The relief that washes over me to see the site itself looks lovely is immense. I’d feared we would be arriving at a boggy field and would need welly boots and torches to find our way to wherever the mysterious Peggy would be waiting for us.
Instead we arrive at a car park a short distance from the sand dunes. Grabbing our bags, we walk through a twisted willow arbour, which has been strewn with fairy lights, to reach our home for the weekend. Six yurts circle around a central meeting space, which is dominated by a large wooden gazebo.
‘Oh, this is verr, verr pretty,’ Niamh slurs. I’m not sure how much of her ‘Fanta’ she drank but I haven’t seen her this wobbly through drink in a long time.
The sound of voices drifts on the evening air towards us, along with the sound of the waves a short distance away crashing to the shore. There’s a smell of woodsmoke in the air and music is playing somewhere. As we get closer, I can just make out that the gazebo seems to be populated by a group of maybe nine or ten people, all dressed in heavy coats and hats and clutching mugs of steaming liquid. Hopefully it’s coffee and it’s plentiful and I can throw some down Niamh’s neck, and possibly Laura’s too, and bring them back into the land of the living.
Thankfully, given their unsteady gait, we’re not having to traipse through soggy bogland; instead, we’re walking on a pathway of mulch and bark chippings. We come to a wooden sign which offers directions to a ‘meeting house’ – which I can’t see from this circle of yurts.
Truth be told, the name ‘meeting house’ is giving me kind of old-world American puritan vibes. My nerves are definitely starting to kick in. I’m hoping the laughter emanating from the gazebo means I’m wrong and it’s not a place where suspected witches are put on trial.
Other signs point to the different yurts, which all seem to be named after Celtic gods and goddesses. It’s all quite nice, if basic and, in the absence of being able to see any obvious toilet or shower block, I start to worry about the availability of facilities. Might we have to schlepp to the meeting house for a middle-of-the-night pee? With my menopausal bladder, there’s a chance I could get my ten thousand steps in overnight.
‘Do you think we could move here permanently?’ Laura asks. ‘And not tell anyone where we’ve gone?’
‘Don’t tempt me!’ Niamh laughs, and takes another swig from her now empty bottle. When she takes it away from her mouth, completely disgusted that there is nothing left in it, she looks totally confused. It seems she’s the level of drunk who can’t make the connection between her current state and the now-missing Fanta. ‘Later I’m going to tell you about my Hag Cottage dream, for when I tell the whole world to go and shove itself up its own arse.’
Laura flashes me a look of concern – now realising just how inebriated Niamh is.
