happening to their bodies and their brains, nor what to do about it!’
They were silent again.
‘And anyway,’ I said, ‘I have to do something about myself. You two seem to be content with the way things are for you, but I’m not. I mean, leaving Min out of it, what do I have in mind for my own life? Nothing, is the answer.’
There was an uneasy silence as we got into Tessa’s car and queued to exit from the car park. Tessa was pretty contemptuous, usually, of women who ‘let themselves go’. She might think that the least an overweight woman could do is hate herself. But I couldn’t really predict what she’d think, even though we were old friends. When I knew her first, when I got a job in Boody’s Bookshop after leaving The Pillar Department Store, Tessa was having some kind of relationship with Hugh Boody, even though she was the shop steward and he was the boss. For years the two of them went to the opera together all around Europe. We girls who worked in the store were inclined to believe that was all it was, a friendship based on love of singing. We were young. We thought they couldn’t be sleeping together because Tessa looked like Audrey Hepburn and Hugh Boody, who looked like a gentle horse, was twice her age.
Their relationship had fascinated Min. ‘Where are they now?’ she’d say. ‘Where are they now?’ A temporary secretary once saw a receipt for a room in Parma for Signor and Signora Boody, but of course that signora could have been Mr Boody’s real wife, a lady with grey hair and an English accent who never remembered our names.
‘Where’s Parma?’ Min asked when I told her, making me point the name out on a map of Europe. Though I don’t know that Min really understood how maps work – seeing she always made me show her which bit was Ireland.
Tessa and Hugh Boody were – whatever they were – for a long time, and his name would come into the conversation every time I came back to visit, until one day, about ten years ago, when Min in her roundup of gossip said she’d kept the newspaper with a write-up about Mr Boody, and a picture of him at the races only a week before he died.
‘He’s dead!’
‘He died in a taxi,’ Min said. ‘The poor taxi man must have got an awful fright.’
She got the obituary for me and I read it later, up in my room.
I thought about writing a proper note of sympathy to Tessa, but before I did she heard I was back, and called to the house to see me. I intended to hold her hand or something like that and say I was sorry, but I didn’t get round to it and eventually she said that she missed Hugh a lot, but that she’d been able to retrieve the money on their season ticket to Covent Garden. It was the perfect reminder I always got, sooner or later when I came back to Kilbride, of how people there kept certain emotions to themselves. You were allowed to be dramatic, but not really revelatory.
We were crawling now towards Kilbride, stuck behind a mobile home with a GB plate, when I said, to lighten the mood, ‘Bloody English. Eight hundred years of brutal oppression and now this.’
‘Nine hundred,’ Peg said, ‘because we’re in the 2000s now. Did you know that it ended up that a Catholic wasn’t allowed to own a horse? That’s what my da told me. That’s one of the reasons he always kept a few horses when he could find somewhere around Kilbride to graze them. He didn’t even like horses. But he did it because the English came over and they took our land and they kept us down by force and they treated us worse and worse the longer they were here.’
‘I didn’t know you felt like that, Peg,’ I said, surprised. ‘I knew you were a Catholic – I mean, a real Catholic, sure we’re all the other kind. But I didn’t know you waved the green flag, too.’
‘What’s wrong with being a Catholic?’ Peg said truculently. ‘I go to Mass on a Sunday. Monty goes to Mass when he stays in our house. Eighty-something per cent of the population of the Republic of Ireland go.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with being a Catholic,’ Tessa said in a soothing voice. ‘Rosie didn’t say there—’
‘She implied.’
‘She didn’t imply.’
‘If I didn’t, I meant to!’ I yelled. ‘I don’t know how you can kneel there, Peg – kneel – in front of a man who calls himself a priest, who belongs to an all-male organisation that specialises – specialises – in bullying and frightening women. The Taliban of their day they were, and still are wherever they can get away with it. Telling poor African women with twenty AIDS-ridden children to be thankful to God they haven’t committed the sin of contraception! Sitting on their fat arses in Rome as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to sit around in frocks, making up things for God to say. No wonder I left Ireland. Everyone should leave Ireland. Women particularly should get the hell out from underneath the gunmen and the priests— ’
‘The priests aren’t God!’ Peg cut across me. ‘It’s all the people together who are the Church, and God is in the love they have for each other.’
‘Tell that to the Pope!’ I cried. ‘Tell that to some poor woman crawling along with a prolapsed womb! Tell— ’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Tessa shouted. ‘Will you two shut up!’
I took deep breaths as silently as I could. Peg always got angry with me at least once a meeting. It always upset me, too. I’d tried suggesting to her a few times that though she had never left her childhood home, I didn’t feel that I was any better than her. I’d said that though I’d travelled, travel is mundane enough when you have very little money. But it hadn’t been mundane. There was a morning, a very early morning – and the memory of it is only one of thousands of memories – when I waited for a bus in a taverna in a village in the Mani, where the Greek men stood in the half-dark at the counter drinking their coffees and rakis, and the lamp flickered in front of a wall of icons, and a golden dawn moved across the cobbles of the old square towards the open door. Was I not indeed enviable, because there had been moments like that? If it had been the other way around, and it was me who had never travelled, I’d surely have envied Peg.
‘I’m sorry, girls,’ Peg whispered. ‘I don’t know why everything’s getting to me these days. I’m taking Saint John’s Wort but I don’t think it’s doing me any good. I think I’ll go back to acupuncture.’
‘Acupuncture is only a distraction,’ I said. ‘We have deep needs, all three of us, and— ’
‘You’ve hit the nail on the head!’ Tessa interrupted me. ‘Needs! Why don’t we talk about my needs. Actually, I do have a bit of news you might be interested in.’
‘Tess!’ we said. ‘What?’
‘But since I’ve just spotted the only parking place within an ass’s roar of Rosie’s house…’
‘Oh, Tess baby!’
‘Wait!’
‘Hurry up, can you, Tess?’ Peg said. ‘I promised I’d get back to my dad before eleven.’
‘I’m tired telling you that you make a martyr of yourself to that man,’ Tessa said, turning off the ignition.
I settled myself in happy anticipation. I enjoyed Tessa very much, and whatever it was she was going to do, it would be a practical, intelligent action. She acted where I brooded.
She waited a moment before addressing us.
‘Girls, I am not satisfied with the way things are; the way Rosie said I was. I’ve decided to make a change.’
A bell somewhere far away rang the hour. Markey used to know each Dublin bell so well that he could tell you which church it belonged to.
‘I would have told you,’ Tessa said. ‘But, you know, I wasn’t sure till today that I’d go through with it. But this morning I was in a bit of a confrontation with Paschal Kelly, director of the Counselling Training Centre – El Creepo as he is called by his staff – because I happened