The Spanish Exposition

Peaches

2014-12-19T19:19:00.000+00:00

Let me know the news if you have a sec, says Frank in his email. He and Bożena are living in Columbia now. He says the abundant narcotics and fruit there suits them. Before that they lived in China for a while. This time last year they slept in our bed and Andrew and I spent the night on a slowly deflating airbed in our front room. After that I spent a few weeks looking up loft beds online, reluctant to commit to the front room as a bedroom instead of a bike shed. I didn't buy one in the end. Since moving into our house two years ago, the house they'll have to carry me out of in a box, Frank and Bożena have been our only overnight guests. My three-and-a-half-year-old niece asked her daddy a while back if she could have a sleepover in our house. But I don't know where I'd sleep, she said.

What news have I that would mean anything to Frank? We're both well, I say. Because we are.

I tell him that I got a promotion at work and that it was hard won. I appreciate that now, though it was difficult at the time.

I am better for it. I tell him that Andrew ran a marathon and that that was hard too, and wonderful and disappointing and that he's better for it. I sent on a photo of him crossing the line, arms raised in victory, knock-kneed in his too-big shorts, the pockets of which were filled, still, after 26 miles and 385 yards, with chocolate bars and energy gels. He'd been too grateful to the friends who'd waited along the route to support him to refuse them, even though he was unable to eat. He says he wished it had been me waiting on him at every stop. I ran with him on Milltown Road, awkward in jeans and a raincoat, holding his hand. Your bike! he said. Fuck the bike, I said, frightened by how pale he looked, and how sad. The bike was fine. I told him I loved him, let him go, watched him run. When he saw me again on Mount Street my heart lifted with his and then burst when he blew me a kiss and shouted to the thousands lined up at the barriers that he loved me. Aw, said the people to my left and my right.

I'm going to run it next year, I tell Frank.

We used to practice yoga with a woman who lived around the corner and thought that gravity was an arbitrary law. She's living in Australia now. I remember a cold November class where we lay on the floor, swaddled in blankets, silently repeating a mantra of our choosing. Something that meant something to us. I will run a marathon. I will run a marathon. I will run a marathon. I hope mantras are not like birthday cake candle wishes.

I can't run at all at the moment, I tell Frank, I had surgery in mid November. I tell him this in case he'd gotten as far as the line about me running the half marathon in September and hot-footed it to Strava to track my subsequent progress only to see that I've been sitting on the couch watching 30 Rock and eating shortbread for a full month now.

Laparoscopy, hysteroscopy, ovarian diathermy. Did you sign the consent form? asked the surgeon when she called to see me before I was brought to theatre. I did, I said, in between taking selfies in my surgical cap and gown and wondering what would happen if I died during the procedure. Noli timere. Did you read the consent form? she asked. I did, I said. Laparoscopy, hysteroscopy, ovarian diathermy. It says "laparoscopy, hysterectomy, ovarian diathermy", she said. She corrected it and I signed it again. Don't worry, she said, it's not your fault.

The nurse who brought me to theatre took my hand on the walk down the corridor. I thought it was odd, but she was nice so I didn't say anything. I had to wait outside for a bit while the surgeons performed an emergency Caesarian section. I didn't cry until I heard the baby crying. My mother's in the same hospital room now. My dad says we should have a plaque on the door. I'm not sure what it would read.

I don't want to sign off on a sad note. It's been a shitty year of treatments that didn't work and made me mad an occasionally suicidal, I say, but now we're just going to get on with things and maybe register the cats with a local playschool. He'll appreciate my levity. I tell him about our holidays this year, because I know he likes to travel. I like it less as I grow older and that worries me. We had a disastrous holiday in a treehouse in Cornwall, I tell him, though I do not go into specifics. We went to Tenerife, I tell him, and I resist the temptation to explain that it wasn't like that. I send a link instead to my instagram, with an apologetic aside to say that I haven't written much this year but that I've instead taken lots of photos.

I don't have a camera. I browse secondhand SLRs online but, like the loft bed, I am reluctant to commit. I need space for my bicycles, and room to write.

Every Time The Time Was Right All The Words Just Came Out Wrong

2014-07-29T09:00:00.000+01:00

I'm four years married today. Andrew pulled me close in bed this morning and told me how much he loves me and how very proud he is to be married to me because he feels like it's the best thing he's ever done. I told him that any fool can sign a contract, that it's the little things he does every day he should be proud of.

What an extraordinary thing, to start each ordinary day this way. We lay there for a minute or two longer (it is our fourth wedding anniversary, after all) and the little cat climbed in through the bedroom window and got sick on the carpet.

We eat breakfast together every day; porridge with cinnamon and honey, orange juice for him though I'll drink from his glass when he leaves the table to fix his hair, toast and coffee if there's time, yesterday's coffee reheated in the microwave if there isn't. We listen to the radio and talk back to it and to each other. I like to listen to 'It Says In The Papers', though if the weather is grey I'll put music on instead and we'll make fun of Marty Whelan. When we got married first I ate breakfast in work and he ate cinnamon rolls from the Bretzel on the bus and I didn't think life could get any better but look, it does.

He brought ripe Saturn peaches home for me last Friday, and beautiful rose soap petals for the bath. He brought beautiful hydrangeas home for me yesterday. I had such a headache when I got in from work that I didn't see them. Instead I saw the paper bag with an unwritten card inside and I told him that if he's going to surprise me with things he shouldn't leave them out on the kitchen table. I forgot, he said, contrite despite my bad temper. I just wanted you to see the flowers. I took some painkillers and went to lay down on the bed. He got a damp facecloth for me and lay beside me, holding my hand. Tell me about your day, I said.

The traditional gift for a fourth wedding anniversary, he tells me, is fruit and flowers, specifically hydrangeas. We sat at the kitchen table after dinner and watched the big cat chewing on the jug of flowers for a good twenty minutes.

Andrew tells me that the librarians at the Chicago Public Library came up with a new list of suggested "modern" gifts to mark wedding anniversaries ("Appliances (electrical) ... Desk sets/pen and pencil sets") but that he doesn't see how fruit and flowers aren't modern. It means as much to me that he looks these things up on Wikipedia as it does to receive a present at all.

This year, unlike last year or the year before or even the year before that, I got a present for him. But it hasn't cleared Customs yet and I forgot all about a card so I'm going home empty-handed again. I meant to write him a letter. I used to do that now and then, when first we lived together. He still has them all crammed into an envelope that he keeps by the bed. He'd break your heart, wouldn't he?

He is a salve for mine, always but most especially when I am not myself. I am taking medroxyprogesterone at the moment and it makes me cry. I am fat, sad, disgusting. You're only one of those, he tells me, and he pulls me close again in the kitchen and kisses the freckles on my forehead. I farted, I said. So I'm disgusting. And we both laugh. We have a good life and he is my constant reminder.

I need reminding. I had a panic attack cycling up Mobhi Road on my way to work this morning. A hearse pulled out from Home Farm Road, "GRANDAD" spelled out in white carnations along the windows, each letter a foot high. "I'll never be a grandad" I thought to myself sadly (medroxyprogesterone). Then I began to hyperventilate at the thoughts of one day being put in a coffin and driven away from Andrew in a hearse. I need to make friends with someone who owns a station wagon, I decided. Or to buy a station wagon and teach a friend how to park it. I don't want a hearse. And I don't want Andrew to have to drive. I wondered if he'd bury me or burn me and scatter me 'round the park like I asked, and my eyes flooded with tears as my breath ran out and I pulled on my brakes as the lights turned red at the top of the hill. Four years have passed in the blink of an eye. The lights changed and I sucked it up, pushed on my pedals, stretched an arm across the traffic and turned.

I Went To The Doctor And Guess What He Told Me

2014-06-25T22:31:00.000+01:00

I had an MRI today. I got excited about it when the doctor called last week; I appreciate science fiction aesthetics and non-invasive medical procedures.

I've had a lot of non-non-invasive medical procedures done in the last six months.

I had six transvaginal ultrasounds in February and March. I had one on my birthday and I waited for the nurse to say something after she'd confirmed my date of birth, but she didn't, so I just took my pants off. Happy birthday to me! I will remember turning 33. I had a hysteroscopy last month, and a hysterosalpingogram the month before that. Hysterosalpingogram is a much harder word to spell but a much easier procedure to endure. I passed out during the hysteroscopy. I was shocked for a day or two afterwards. "I have nothing to compare it to" I kept saying. I compare most things to the climb up Cruagh Road, which I can sometimes but not always manage on my bike. I compare invasive medical procedures to the cervical biopsy I had a couple of years back. I like to think I'm tough, that I can manage most anything once I know what I'm in for. It was very challenging to find that that doesn't always hold true.

Today was a walk in the park, by comparison. I was referred to St. Vincent's Private for the MRI, even though I have no health insurance. I half expected some kind of alarm to sound when I said as much to the receptionist. She made no comment, just handed me a safety questionnaire and waved me to a seat. Vincent's is like a hotel lobby and everyone else there was old. I'm used to Holles Street, where the bathrooms are grotty and the patients are anxious and the staff are exceptionally kind. I often leave there feeling lucky.

The radiologist who brought me through to the treatment room in Vincent's knew how to pronounce my name. That happens so rarely that I usually comment, but I didn't today. I just took off my clothes and put on the gown she'd left for me, then sat on the gurney, legs dangling, and waited for her to come back. I thought about taking a photo of myself in the gown, but I was afraid she'd catch me. I took off my wedding rings and clipped them together with the slide from my hair, then tucked them into my shoe. "Have you anything in your hair?" she asked me when she came back, and she gave it a look. It's humid today and I am Barbados Monica. "It's in my shoe" I said, and she looked at me like I was mad. "Come on" she said.

The room in which the scanner is kept is like something from a film set on a spaceship. Everything's white. I wanted more time to take it in. But she hurried me onto the scanner bed and placed a pair of padded green cans over my ears as the bed slid into the machine. "Can you hear me?" she asked through the comms. "I can thank you" I said. "CAN YOU HEAR ME?" she barked. "YES" I said. Like an automated fucking phone system.

I thought there would be music, I thought that's what the headphones were for. Maybe you have to have health insurance. I made my own, like Tyres at the traffic lights. The machine thrummed and thumped and I lay there trying really hard not to move and thought about how I used to listen to music not unlike this terrifying noise, back when I took drugs and went clubbing and fucked other people's boyfriends. These days I go to see kora music played in the concert hall with my husband and our parents and drink soda water at the interval. I book the tickets. I'm happier for it.

The scan took ages. My nose started to itch. The dull ache in my lower back began to creep down towards my tailbone. There's not much to look at inside an MRI machine. They should print some poetry on it or something, like the backs of the seats on old Aer Lingus planes. I am always happier when I have something to read, much happier than when I have something to write. Anything to distract me from the inevitability of death, yours and mine. That's mostly what I'm left with when I've nothing to read. The inside of the machine had scratches on it. Striated black marks, seven of them, ragged and uneven. Everything else in Vincent's looks box-fresh, unused. Something must have happened. The dull dread in my gut began to creep up towards my gorge and I felt again the rubbery bladder of the alarm in my right hand.

"FOLLOW THE BREATHING INSTRUCTIONS" she barked again, and I panicked, thinking I'd missed something. Then a recorded voice told me to take a deep breath, and then to hold it, and then to relax. Take a deep breath, hold it, relax.

She took the headphones from my ears as the scanner bed rolled out and told me to sit up as soon as I was ready and then to dress again behind the curtain and leave. The floor seemed further away than it had when I'd climbed up onto the bed. I walked stiff-legged back to my cubicle, the back of my gown flapping open where I hadn't managed to negotiate the ties. As I pulled the curtain, I noticed an elderly man in a gown sitting in the far corner, quietly waiting his turn. He was still wearing his black brogues. He nodded to me and then, hearing his name called, shuffled in to have his atoms rearranged.

I pulled my clothes back on, burying my nose first in the underarms of my dress, still slightly damp from the bike ride over. I rooted my rings out from my shoe and repinned the roll at the side of my hair, seeing only the bags under my eyes in the mirror. I could hear the machine clanking and banging in the next room as I switched off all the lights in my efforts to find the door release.

I was tired, upset, hungry. I'd brought a sandwich and a bottle of water in my bag but I was too embarrassed to sit outside and eat, so I set out for the office. As I rode back along the Strand Road, a man stopped and took a photo of me. I must have looked beautiful to him on my big black bike, my dress and hair streaming behind me and my worried head held high.

January To June

2014-06-06T12:04:00.002+01:00

There are all these things you think you’ll do, but you won’t.

I’m learning to let things slide. The cats sleep in our room now. One sleeps curled up beside me, or on my chest, or between Andrew and me or wherever he fucking well pleases, the other sleeps curled up on the chenille blanket by the radiator. I get up in the middle of the night to let them out. Or in. Or out. I need to get up anyway to go to the bathroom. I’m getting older and don't expect to sleep through the night.

I thought I would write, but I don't. Two years into Andrew’s studies and the 180-piece IKEA corner desk I assembled to house the old computer I begged from work remains unused. Andrew doesn’t use the desk. He doesn’t like the plastic swivel chair, he prefers to study at the kitchen table or on the couch, or propped up on our bed. I like the chair well enough, I feel I have to because I chose it. It’s shiny and nailpolish red. I’ve only ever sat in it to tidy away the pieces of coloured tissue and fancy paper I keep in one of the desk’s alcoves, scavenged from prettily-packaged presents to be reused to wrap some of my own. That’s something I’ve gotten better at; thoughtful, hand-made gifts.

When we moved in first I spent ages browsing antique desks and leather swivel chairs on classified ads websites, but we don’t really have the room. The IKEA desk is fine. The office is where we keep the hoover and my fancy tissue paper and the sewing machine that I’ve never really gotten to grips with. We dry the washing in there on a clothes horse. The computer is not plugged in.

For a while I worried about where we’d put the IKEA desk if we had a baby. We’d need that room, and we couldn’t move it to the front room because that’s where I keep my bicycles. Then I worried about needing the front room too for my mam or my sister to come and stay because what if I couldn’t cope and then where would the bicycles go now that we’ve knocked down the rotting shed and thrown it in the skip with everything else the Byrnes left behind. Then I worried that the bicycles wouldn’t matter anymore because I wouldn’t be able to ride them anyway after having a baby. I worry a lot.

Learning to let things slide is difficult. I don't just mean our hopes to have a family, I mean everything, all the small things too. Accepting with grace that the world will not end if the house hasn't been hoovered in a week. Learning to live with the weeds in the garden and hugs from friends on days when I would rather they ignored me.

I do lots of things I never thought I could. I update Strava instead of blogging. I don’t write here because I don’t want to write about this and this is all I have to write about at the moment. Spend time with me and I’ll tell you all my stories and they'll be funny and warm because I want you to love me. But here, by myself, this is it and I am sorry and bored. I might write my guts out some other time but right now, I do not want to spend any time at that desk, in that corner where we’d probably put a cot if there was a baby to sleep in it.

I'm Every Woman, It's All In Me

2014-01-28T14:00:00.000+00:00

Yesterday's lunch was a disappointment. I'd brought in some brown bread (homemade) and some mushroom soup (homemade) but the bread was a little bit stale and the soup was spoiled. Already grey, it had green spots and farted when I lifted the lid of the tupperware. I slid it into a resealable sandwich bag and plopped it into the bin.

Did you think I'd eat it?

I ate the bread alright. I didn't have much option, or any change for the vending machine, and anyway, I am very pious at lunch. I eat very well when other people are watching.

Did you make it yourself? my colleagues ask. Oh yes, I say, and I'll mealy-mouth about how it's cheaper than buying bread or about how I can't eat shop-bought soup because I'm allergic to MSG. Oh, god, shut up. I think I'm better than them. How sad for me, that my bread is stale and my soup spoiled.

I made fresh bread last night. I had to use the top oven to bake the bread. I'm not sure I'd ever used it before. I'd cleaned the main oven on Sunday evening but it still stank of ammonia, so I couldn't use it. Andrew scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed at it and we left it on at full heat for an hour, to burn off the chemicals. I reread the back of the can of foam spray I'd used, in case I'd missed something. It says not to use it for eight hours, I said to Andrew, and that was a full 24 hours ago now. But there was no arguing with the catpiss stench the oven belched when you opened its door. I'd never cleaned an oven before. I'm not so great.

But I did make fresh soup. Pumpkin soup. And I grew the pumpkin. I'll be sure to mention that.

My brother tells me that my two-and-a-half-year-old niece is into roleplay at the moment. You be the babies, she says to her parents, and I'll be you, daddy. She stands outside the bedroom door and tells them to Cry, babies! then storms in and barks Why are you crying, babies? It's time to go asleep! It cracks them up.

My mother taught me to cook. To spite her, I aped the TV chefs, laying all my ingredients out in bowls and on saucers. My mother's insistence on using leftovers disgusted me. The first time she made her own cranberry sauce she made a full batch, we ate it on Christmas day and then unknowingly in every curry, casserole and stew she made for a full year. When she told me, it is no exaggeration to say that I felt betrayed. And now look. I made pumpkin soup but it didn't taste like much so I rummaged in the fridge to see what else I could add to it. There was half a roll of soft goat's cheese slowly drying in its wrapper, so I added that. There was a tupperware of leftover day-old mashed turnip and a bowl of week-old colcannon. So I added those.

No sense in wasting them, I said to myself.

Everything I Ever Wanted

2014-01-24T18:01:00.000+00:00

I worry a lot about where things should go. The physical space they should inhabit. I am a tidy person, most of the time, though not always a clean one. But I like to know where everything is.

I hurt my ankle on Wednesday; I went running at lunchtime and it didn't feel right but by the time I was in real pain I was far enough from the office to talk myself into running the rest of the way back. Andrew had to come and pick me up after work, in the car. He tried to fit my bicycle into the boot, but it got stuck. It won't fit, I insisted from the passenger seat, leave it, please, I'll pick it up tomorrow. I almost have it, he said, and I winced at the sound of the wicker basket scraping along the brace for the back seats.

It's a new basket. The cat had chewed at the willow on my last one and I'd tried to repair it by weaving twine around the rim, but the man in the bike shop said it made him sad to look at it, and so I replaced it. I've kept the old one for picking apples. It's rotting outside the patio door.

I was very good at Tetris as a kid, I said to Andrew once he'd hefted the bike back out of the boot and locked it up again. And I'm good at parallel parking. You can't drive into a space though, he said, and he's right. There was no need for my I-told-you-so.

We stopped at the library on the way home so that I could return some books. One of them was so overdue that I'd received a notice in the post, printed on perforated paper. It looked like a payslip. I called the library immediately, indignant, insisting that I had returned it in early December. I remember, I said, because I had renewed all of the books in that batch but couldn't renew the DVD, Pavee Lackeen, and when I returned the lot and asked to pay the fine I was told that it had never been checked out on my account. So, I said, there must have been another mistake made. Jennifer was patient, she put me on hold and went to check the shelves again. My battery died. You definitely returned it? Andrew asked. Definitely, I said. I keep the library books separate, on the table by the front door, so that this doesn't happen. I borrowed his phone to call Jennifer back, but before I dialled I checked the stack of books on the desk in the office. There it was. Hello, Jennifer? I said, I'm so sorry...

We hadn't even watched Pavee Lackeen. Well, we watched a bit of it but then we got bored.

When we got to the library, I couldn't get out of the car. The books are in a red cloth bag under my coat behind the driver's seat, I said to Andrew. I'm always telling him where things are. Exactly, specifically where things are. Sometimes I wait to see if he finds them himself, even though I know I could save him the trouble. Sometimes I think I am a bad person, and that there is something very wrong with me. That I am not capable of being good. He brought the books back to the librarian and paid my small fine, and I sat in the car with my swollen ankle and cried.

I told my mam that I'd sprained my ankle. She said she'd bring me to the hospital. I said no, and she said she'd call in the morning. I didn't sleep well.

The next day, after Andrew had gone to work and while I waited for my mother to call, I planned how I might tidy the house even though I was more-or-less unable to walk. There wasn't much to be done, a few small things out of place. Dishes to be put in the dishwasher, boots to be straightened in the hall. I could almost hear Andrew pleading with me to cop on, to let it go, that that stuff doesn't matter. It does and it doesn't.

I remember a man I slept with, once, who thought he was cleverer than I. He watched me make my bed the next morning and asked why I felt the need to.

He moved to Berlin, like Julian Gough.

In the end I took the dishes from the sitting room to the kitchen with me and left it at that. Mam didn't even come in, we just went straight down to the clinic in Smithfield. Which was just as well, as by the time she arrived I had moved on to planning the renovations we'd need to make the house wheelchair-accessible. Sometimes when I can't sleep, early in the morning, I lie in bed fretting about how we'll manage when we're older. Our bed is pushed up against the wall, Andrew has to climb across me to get in and out. It's very romantic. You don't plan for old age, when you're buying your first bed together. We spent an hour sitting on every one in the shop and then bought the biggest one they had.

Sometimes I think about where I'd put a crib (I'd put it where the bedside locker is). I'd move the bedside locker to where the washbasket is, I'd keep the washbasket in the kitchen by the back door. There's space for a buggy in the front room, with the bikes. There's space for a bed in the office, if I dismantle the desk. It took 160 steps to build, but I probably wouldn't mind. Andrew wouldn't either. He doesn't use the desk, preferring to study in the kitchen while I cook, or curled up on the couch while I read. He's sitting here now, impatiently reading Ulysses and waiting to read what I write.

I left the Rapid Injury Clinic two hours later with a note for my employers and a tubigrip support bandage. The doctor was a runner, she understood why I'd kept going even when it hurt, and talked to me about what I could do over the next few weeks (swim, ride my bike) instead of telling me what I shouldn't (run). I bought mam lunch and she brought me home. Andrew came in from work with dinner, dessert, tulips, a packet of Nurofen Plus and a palpable sense of relief. We ate dinner, the cat ate the tulips and I slept a dreamless, painless sleep in our great big bed.

Stories That Aren't Mine To Tell

2014-01-10T23:20:00.002+00:00

So that was Christmas. I took the decorations down on Monday while Andrew made dinner. I got the lopper and cut the tree up where it stood in the sitting room, stuffed it into a black sack and tied it up to put out for the binmen. Nollaig na mBan. The first day back after the holidays.

Ann won't be coming back to work. Her visa came through the week before Christmas and she left on New Year's Eve. She's gone to Ohio. We looked it up on Google Streetview in work one day, had ourselves a walk around. There wasn't much to see. She says it's cold there, that the bread's no good and that there's no marmalade. I miss her. Maura sent her a recipe for soda bread and I sent her a rambling email full of carefully-worded concern. I am worried that she will be lonely.

This week it's just me, Maura and Aindreas. We finish off the box of Milk Tray and the Rocky bars that were left in Ann's stash.

Maura's mam talked for ten days straight over Christmas. She went hoarse. She's still in hospital.

Aindreas burnt down his family's kitchen making toast. Everyone was okay, so we laughed about it. But all the same. He says that the worst of it is that they don't have a new toaster yet, and that styrofoam snowflakes keep falling from the ruined ceiling above the hob and into the wok when he's cooking. The gluten-free bread he toasts for his second breakfast fills the office with a sweet smell, like tea brack.

Lorna's sister died. Lorna came back to work on Wednesday and she told me a little about her, about being with her when she died. I made "I know" noises but I don't, not really. For all the hours I spent with my grandfather when he was dying, I was in the car on my way home when he died. So I don't know. I can't even imagine. I gave her a hug because that was all I had to offer.

Ciara had a baby. A little girl. She is bowled over with love for her. She says she is like a little animal; small noises, warm and snuggly. I plan to visit, but I have planned it for two days after my piss-or-get-off-the-pot appointment with the fertility clinic. So we'll see.

How about you?

My Christmas was quiet, I told them.

Andrew had his appointment with the clinic in December. He spunked all over the floor. I'm sorry, but he did. He had to fill out a form for the receptionist and indicate what percentage, if any, of the sample was spilled. She was right outside when he opened the door to leave the special room, waiting to see how he'd got on. 30%, he said, and please don't ask where because you're standing in it. She wasn't, of course. He'd cleaned it up. Which makes you think; it must be someone's job to check and clean the room after each client, mustn't it? He said the room smelled neither of bleach nor semen. I wonder what they use.

In the pub on Christmas Eve eve I was thrilled to hear him telling his friends about his visit to the clinic, about the magazines and the spillage and the feeling of elation walking to work after your first wank in four days. I don't want him to feel embarrassed about it, about any of this. I am proud of him. But I can't seem to help myself. Imagine all I had to do to get pregnant was go to the clinic and have a wank! I say, making him small again because at the end of the day, I think that this is all about me. I am afraid I am making it harder.

Four days into this interminable five-day week, I finally got some drama of my own. I was out for a run on my lunchbreak (I know!) when I got a text message from my GP with news of the liver profile she'd run before Christmas. Blood test results abnormal. Dr. B. Naturally, I panicked. Then I tried to panic everyone else. I left a message for the doctor to call me back, and spent the afternoon studying liver disease on Wikipedia and caveats on health insurance websites.

Maybe it was autocorrect, I said. Maybe she made a mistake.

She didn't call me back. When I got home that evening, Andrew made me a bowl of chilli and a mug of hot chocolate and I went to bed with hair still damp from the shower and dreamt of an early death.

I got up early this morning, put my best dress on and brought the car for its NCT. It failed. I went to work and left another 5 messages for the GP. She didn't call me back, not until I had denounced her to anyone who'd listen, not until 6.30 this evening.

I'm so sorry, she said, we must have made a mistake. Your liver function is perfect.

Here Is A Song From The Wrong Side Of Town

2013-11-13T23:06:00.000+00:00

I came home today to a handwritten note from a local estate agent, looking to buy our house. Good morning! she'd written. I am guessing she's a woman, her cheerful cursive reminds me of the girls I tried to copy in school. I never quite managed it. She filled the a5 page with her note, neatly penned in blue biro. I was so charmed by her effort that I considered her offer, for a brief minute. To come and value our home, visit and put a price on someone else's imagined happiness. I've already paid the price for mine.

I imagine her having neat hair, a small car, maybe a Fiesta or a Yaris, a suit from Dunnes Stores, raggy, bitten fingernails. I wonder who else's doors she's slipped notes under. She can't have written to the whole road. When one of our cats went missing I made flyers and put them through everyone's letterboxes. And that took ages. She can't have sat down and written a note to each of the neighbours. She'd get a cramp.

But it wasn't photocopied. I checked. I ran my finger over the small indentations left by her pen.

The note said that she was sorry to have missed us. The ESB and the gas man say that on their notes all the time too, but they just post them through the door and never ring the bell, I know because I've been here when they've pretended to call. Our cottages don't have hallways, so having something shoved through your letterbox when you're at home on the couch feels unpleasantly intimate. We get few cold callers but when they knock, everybody has to be very quiet.

I don't know what I'd have said to her had she called, had I been home. I might have asked her in, shown her around. We have a big garden, I'd have said, aren't we very lucky?

We're here almost a year now, in our new house. You've probably been here too, I can't think of anyone who hasn't. It's been that kind of year. I am immensely proud of it, so much so that I am afraid to say it. Instead I say that the rooms are small, the windows badly fitted. They are. But we have a beautiful home. I have not had bad dreams since we came to live here.

I'd have told her we've only just moved in. I'd have told her about the problems with the plumbing and the bollocks in number 38, about how Dolly's house is vacant and how I suspect Mrs. Brady might be dead (really dead this time) but that she should ask Susan. Not that it's any of her business. I'd have told her how much we paid for it because that is, after all, her business precisely but she'd know that anyway, it's a matter of public record. It might be why she put the note through the door in the first place.

I'd have told her we're not interested, thanks. It's what I remember my mam saying any time someone called to the door selling something when we were kids. Back then it was travellers, mostly, which seems quaint now. There was one woman, Peggy, that she was friendly with and always had something for, but everyone else got short shrift. We're not interested, thanks. Dad would fish a pound out of his pocket and come away from the door with a holy medal. He didn't answer the door too often. Someone selling metered electricity called to the door the other night while I was out at college. I told him I didn't know what we pay, Andrew said, that you deal with that, so he said he'd call back at eight. Tell him we're not interested, thanks, I said. He didn't call back.

I like to imagine I'd have offered the agent a cup of tea but I wouldn't have, not in a million years. But I like to imagine. It would be nice to have a professional assess what we've done with the place. I cried my eyes out on our first night here, cold and snotty on a blow-up bed, the cat staring anxiously at me and the dull smell of other people's shite seeping up from under the floors. I worried my skin grey. But we got there, Andrew and I, with help from family and friends. There are still pots of unopened paint and plenty of pictures waiting to be hung, but when Caroline comes to visit she claps her hands and says I LOVE YOUR HOUSE with such heart that mine bounces in my chest.

I'm So Tired Of Feeling Sick And Tired

2013-11-08T13:14:00.000+00:00

Important! proclaims the subject line of Iwona's email, but it's not. Not to me, anyway. I was in work, at work, working on very serious things. Planning people's futures. She's planning a tattoo and wanted help with translation. She found me on the internet, she told me. Doesn't everyone? I ignored her email. I haven't time for that kind of thing.

Work is tiring. I am tired anyway, all the time. Vertigo has me skimming the walls when I walk, splaying my hands across the tilt of the table, leaning on my left elbow as I tap at my keyboard, listing to one side and in a state of permanent self-correction. The medication I've been given to treat it has given me tremors, a cotton-wool mouth and a desperate apathy.

I don't care about Iwona's tattoo.

I didn't care either about the man who called the office yesterday morning and spent an hour and a quarter on the phone to me, who felt his trust had been betrayed (though not by me) and whose voice caught when he called again four hours later, ten minutes before time to go home time, because there was something he'd forgotten to ask. I gave him clear, honest answers, little hope or reassurance, lots of time and patience. I get a lot of these calls. I talk about them in meetings with bureaucrats. I never ask them if they have kids themselves. I know that that's not necessary.

It is wrong to say that I didn't care. I did. Even on bad days, I always do. I care about all of them. It wears me out. My present chemical apathy should feel like respite, I think, but instead it feels like nothing at all. I am a sin eater.

I am good at my job, or at least at this part of it. I have a reputation. "The parents all ask for you" I am told, and some of them do, with a genuine fondness. These people I don't know, whose lives I have affected in a small but significant way by talking to them about the small significances in mine, they ask about me and they hope that they might gift their children with some version of what my parents gave to me. A flair for language that has given me a great facility for communication and empathy. It is an extraordinary position of privilege to be in, this job of mine.

I come home from work exhausted. The weight of someone else's expectations gather like grease in the crease of my chin and in the dark, damp skin either side of my nostrils. When I first started cycling, the huff-and-puff effort of my pedalling home was enough to leave the day's work behind. Now I feel like I should keep going down the North Circular until I hit the park and then ride up and down the S-bends until I have made space again for Andrew.

He made space for me last night on the couch. He was watching football. It's so fucking stressful, watching him watch Arsenal, that normally I leave the room. Here's how he'd be if we had a fight, I think, but we've had fights and he was nothing like that. There was no swearing, no punching the couch cushions, no pent-up aggression; he was the kind and equable man he always is. I am lucky.

I sat beside him on the couch with the laptop perched on a cushion, meaning to write. But I'd nothing to say. Nothing worth saying, anyway. Nothing I could publish on the internet. I shopped instead. A skirt guard for my bicycle and some temporary tattoos. I emailed the images to my sister and she laughed at me. I've always wanted a tattoo, I told her, but they're just so... permanent. They are that, she said.

I fished Iwona's email out of the trash this morning. It was polite, and she knew she was emailing the wrong person, looking in the wrong place, but she didn't know who else to ask. She'd had a stab at the translation herself and had translated 'forever mine' as 'forever a place for extracting mineral resources from the ground'. I emailed her back, and seven emails later we'd fleshed out the context and I'd given her the words she needed to ink her skin. GOD BLESS YOU she said. I am blessed indeed.

I Took Your Laugh By The Collar

2013-11-07T16:57:00.000+00:00

One of the cats caught a mouse. I couldn't be sure which of them it was, I'd opened the door and they'd come tumbling in in a scurry of fur and excitement. It was only when I went to pull the door across to close it (only to open it again five minutes later and then close it and then open it and then close it for that is our routine now in the evenings) that I noticed the mouse in a foetal curl on the bristle mat, its tail an eroteme.

Oh look! I said to Andrew. A present! We're supposed to congratulate them, you know!

And I, for my part, was genuinely delighted.

Andrew got the dustpan.

Wait! I said. I want to take a photo! I took two, on my phone. Later, after the mouse had been dustpanned into a plastic bag, knotted and dumped in the garden bin, I sat down on the couch, cropped the better of the photos and tried to find an Instagram filter that would hide the yellow of its teeth.

When All The Brokenhearted People

2013-11-04T22:05:00.000+00:00

Sick with tiredness, I sat in the departure lounge, across and one seat over from Bridget. She was wearing a lilac-coloured velour tracksuit, a pristine pair of pink and white runners and a mauve raincoat. Mauve is my favourite colour, though I'd never think to say that if someone were to ask me. Bridget and I have the same colour hair, though hers was thinning slightly. Casting Crème Gloss 645 Amber. It goes well with pink tones.

I knew her name was Bridget because she had it on a laminated card hanging from a lanyard around her neck. BRIDGET Marian Pilgrimages. She was with her daughter, a mirror image in blonde and baby blue. She didn't have a card, or if she did she wasn't wearing it. None of the other pilgrims were. But you could tell. There was an air of silent hysteria about the place that had more to it than the unreasonably early hour.

The women looked like Bridget. Neat and resilient. Like women who had lost their men and with it found their purpose. They were in the company of other women; moderate friends or dutiful middle-aged daughters. Mothers, all of them. Not one of them a nun. The men, to a man, looked like men who've never had anyone but their mothers. Their faces florid, their trousers too short, scrofulous creatures with miraculous medals pinned to their raincoats and rosary beads twined around their red chapped knuckles. And they all seemed to be alone. Men like that frighten me. I don't know what to do with them.

Bridget caught me staring at her. My face burned red and I looked away, willing Andrew to return with the coffee so that I would have something to hold and someone to talk to. My gaze snagged on a discarded toenail sitting on the cushion of the chair beside Bridget and my gorge rose in response. Andrew arrived with the coffee but before I could point the toenail out to him someone came and sat on it. I wondered then what I was sitting on. I thought of the priests we'd stood behind in the queue for the baggage drop, rocking on their heels in their socks and sandals, and I imagined their yellowed toenails curling into the callused flesh of their toes. I flaked the almonds from my croissant with a fingertip and chewed.

Sick with tiredness and what I half thought might be the promise of something growing in my womb but am now assured is a virus wreaking havoc in my inner ear, I boarded the plane. We were, all of us, very quiet. A thick fog kept us grounded for some two hours and I almost expected to hear someone lead a prayer for our safe departure. But there was nothing to be heard but resignation, and the anxiety of a hundred and fifty seven people listening out for four hundred metres of visibility.

Ah, Here She Comes, Blocking The Sun

2013-08-09T12:30:00.000+01:00

The Mirror emailed me last week to ask me about my armpits. I wanted to tell my mam and dad about it at the weekend because we were on holidays and there was no television and too much for us to talk about but I didn't know how to bring it up. I suppose I could have just told them that the Mirror emailed me, but I thought it might be hard to explain. How did the Mirror know that I have underarm hair? One of those friends I made on the Internet told them. But why? Why did she tell them? Or why did they email? They wanted to talk to women who don't shave their underarms. It's about a charity, Armpits4August, which is like that one where men grow moustaches except that it's for women like me, with PCOS. Oh. Is that why you stopped shaving? It's a sponsored thing? No, I only heard about the charity afterwards. Why did you, then? Well, that's what they wanted to know.

How mad is it that a tabloid wanted to interview me about my armpits?

I said no. I thought about it and consulted my three wise monkeys, and they all said no. I sent the journalist a quick reply to thank her and say that while I'm happy to discuss it in a personal capacity, I don't want to discuss it in the Mirror. Though I didn't mention it in my reply to her, I particularly didn't want to send her a photograph of myself showing my armpit hair to accompany the feature (she'd asked). I don't have a photo of myself showing my armpit hair. Andrew has a few. He put one on Instagram and it got a comment, just the one, from my sister's boyfriend. It said "no comment".

I like the photo, actually. I am sitting across from him at our kitchen table, wearing the vest I've slept in and reaching up to sweep my hair from my neck. I've been growing that too and getting a lot of compliments on it.

"Nice pits!" said my sister. "Don't think I could do it".

"How are your pits?" asked Ian.

Nobody else mentioned them.

The journalist emailed back to ask why I wasn't keen to be featured. That made me uncomfortable. I wasn't expecting it. I told her that I didn't consider the Mirror to be a female-friendly paper and that I was concerned about how I would be represented. She didn't email me again after that, and I felt bad. Selfish, even. And disappointed.

Maybe I should have given her the interview. She wanted to know when I stopped shaving. April, I think. It might have been May. I stopped caring about everything for a few days and when I reconciled with myself again, shaving my underarms when nobody cared whether I had hair there or not just seemed stupid. So I stopped. The hair grew longer and softer and Andrew said that he didn't mind it and to be honest I liked it, so I left it. I read Emer O'Toole in Vagenda and watched the This Morning clip on YouTube and felt confident. Ish. Confidentier. I thought about emailing Emer to ask how she feels about facial hair, because all women have hair under their arms but the hair on my face marks me out as abnormal. Hormonal. And I'm not ready to be the bearded lady with no kids and two cats. It's fine for her, I thought, she's beautiful! And not fat, I added, though in a quiet little voice because after all, fat is also a feminist issue.

One issue at a time.

June came, and I had to stop wearing cardigans. July came and I had to stop wearing sleeves. "I just wish I could do it without it being a thing" I muttered to Andrew one night as I stretched my arms out to shrug off a cardigan in a stifling hot theatre stall. But nobody was looking at me.

We went out for cocktails a week later. I was in one of those moods; these people are boring and I am a fucking butterfly, etc. (I didn't know them and I didn't feel like going out). I dressed accordingly; heels, lipstick and a cap-sleeved polka-dot dress that makes me want to have sex with myself and shows my underarms off to perfection. Nobody batted an eyelid.

I wore a sleeveless dress to work a week after that and was so delighted with myself that I tweeted about it. "Racy!" I said. I thought I was brave and hilarious and sure, sometimes I am, but I wasn't anything to add an exclamation mark to that day.

I went to a panel discussion about feminism and made sure to stretch my arms during the interval so that everyone there would see my underarm hair and know that I am the most feminist of all. I'm like a toddler testing out swearwords.

"Bollox!" says my almost-two-year-old niece. "Did I tell you that the Mirror emailed me to ask about my armpits?" I say to the secretary in work.

I have slowly gotten used to baring my underarms without feeling like my pubes are on show. I don't need to be a body in protest. I feel like I've gotten away with something, like that time my brother and I got our eyebrows pierced and expected our parents to disown us. Getting your eyebrow pierced feels like being punched in the face. Growing your hair out is painless.

You, It's You And Me

2013-08-07T14:00:00.001+01:00

"Aren't you glad you decided to change your life?"

I am, though I resent the presumptuous tone of the app asking the question. It's not even talking about bicycling. I have a different app for that. This one displays a motivational mantra each time I turn it on. It writes of dreams, fire and bravery, determination and success. It tells me that I am much stronger today than I was only one month ago. It lists my Awesome Wins and it is never sarcastic. I am not yet confident enough to trust it when it trills "Well done! See you again in a couple of days!" at the end of every session. I am worried that I will disappoint it, or that one of us will get bored and wander off.

I can run for eight minutes now without stopping. I could probably run for longer but I haven't tried, because after eight minutes the app pings and a soft American voice tells me to slow down and walk and so I do, grateful and tired. I listen to Shelly Kagan talking about death while I run, and I think about everything else. If something were chasing me, I think I could run for longer. I know that I could run faster. I don't want to. Just to run at all will do.

I will one day run a marathon. I decided this during a yoga nidra class a few weeks ago, where the instructor asked us to visualise a goal while we lay on the floor, swaddled in blankets, trying not to fall asleep (I fell asleep). My goal is to love and be loved and I am, already. So I visualised a goal I might be given a medal for.

Yoga nidra? Visualising goals? Running? What the fuck, I think. You'd have to laugh.

I know that I will one day run a marathon because for approximately two minutes during my eight minute run on Monday night I forgot that I was running at all. And because I overheard my husband (who loves me) telling my mother (who loves me) that I am "very determined". I was just out of the shower, stomping around my parents' holiday home dressed in a towel and searching for a tweezers to pluck an ingrown hair from one of my nipples, when I heard them talking about me in the kitchen. "Why were you telling my mam that I'm stubborn?" I asked Andrew later.

The nipple hair is a symptom. Since coming off all medication for PCOS, the downy hair on my breasts has darkened and wiry, stubborn hairs have sprouted around my areolae. The hair on my upper lip has darkened and thickened too, and it grows now in the cleft beneath my lower lip, on my chin and underneath, all the way down to where it meets my neck. The hospital prescribed a cream to help, but it doesn't. It cost €130, though I didn't know that when I asked the chemist to fill the prescription. I was too embarrassed then to ask her to put it back, I just handed over my credit card. I still use it, when I remember to, but mostly I use a depilatory cream and burn my shame into the sensitive skin of my face.

A thick waist, hirsutism, amenorrhea, anovulation; three words with red lines underneath that I need to check the spelling of, three symptoms of an endocrine disorder and nothing to be ashamed of, I tell myself.

"Step up on the scales" says the consultant.

And so it's hard.

But oh, so much good has come of it and running, yes, that's something.

Hurrying Through The Forks Without Regrets

2013-08-07T14:00:00.000+01:00

I have two bicycles and they both have names and a room of their own in our small, happy home and sometimes when I ride them until I'm filled to bursting I think to myself "if I were to die tomorrow, I will have done this".

I'd rather not die tomorrow. I ride carefully and I cried the three times I fell. Andrew worries about me being knocked down or run over but the truth of it is that each of those times I just fell over where I stood, unable to balance with my foot caught in a stirrup. I am an enthusiastic bicyclist, not an accomplished one. I have the scars to prove it.

I started out a year ago on Ellie, a broad-hipped Raleigh with a cat-chewed basket. I ride around in dresses with my hair down and my colour up. People (that is to say, men) shout things at me. A little girl once shouted at me to tell me that she liked my jumper. It was Andrew's, it has a picture of a tiger on it. The men who shout at me rarely comment on my attire.

In February I got Rosa, a skinny little blue-veined thing, a road bike. Apparently they're not called racers anymore. I signed up for a race in the Wicklow mountains and started training on the S-bends in the Phoenix Park. I kept getting slow punctures. I thought I must be too fat to ride a road bike.

That's embarrassing, isn't it? I'm not too fat for anything.

I wear Lycra. I sometimes think that dressing myself in it is by far the hardest thing about being a bicyclist. I have a basketful of Lidl jerseys and leggings, their padding pink and red like an engorged baboon's arse when they're inside-out on the washing line.

I told everybody and their mothers that I was going to do the Wicklow 100. People thought I was looking for sponsorship but I wasn't, I was looking for reassurance. I got it and I didn't; everybody thought I was a great girl altogether but they all looked fucking surprised. Men who'd done it before squawked warnings and asked about my shoes. I did it in runners and I did it in less than six hours and that's five and a half hours longer than I ever imagined I would sit in a saddle for. I did it alone and I felt alone doing it but that was okay. I did it anyway. They gave me a medal and a certificate. Andrew met me with his parents at the finish line and I was elated and then spent the car journey home snarling at him about his driving and trying not to vomit up the chocolate milk that someone on the John Murray Show had recommended Mini-Marathon runners should drink to aid their recovery. At home, I read that Iain Banks had died and I cried in the shower. We had dinner with friends that evening and they stood with their children in the hallway when I arrived and clapped and cheered and my heart soared and I felt eight years old.

My nana sent a card.

I bought the shoes, the special shoes. I was so scared of them. But they were fine. All of it, it's always fine, even when I fall off and smash my chin on a fence and get picked up off the road by the binmen. I signed up for another race, this time in the Sheeffry mountains, and again had Andrew hold my hand at the starting line before I set out alone and scared, of other people, of falling, of failing. It was a smaller event and I was the only one riding alone. I asked three of the men if I could stick with them and they gave me a treat-size Mars bar and their generous company for fifty of the fifty two kilometres we raced. They walked up the climb, you see. I stayed on my bike.

I don't always.

I Can't Help But Feel Responsible

2013-07-03T16:55:00.000+01:00

We were on our way home from the theatre, where I'd spent the evening distancing myself from the rest of the audience. We collected our tickets and then, too good (too insecure) to wait in the foyer, left the theatre and crossed O'Connell St. to the cornershop to buy a bottle of water and a four-pack of Snickers. We stood outside the Gate and ate a little bar each. "The thinking-man's cigarette!" I joked and I was glad that I didn't want a cigarette and worried that I did want a second Snickers. My status anxiety peaks around theatregoers and elderly in-laws.

The couple sitting beside us had to stand to allow us in to our seats. I was apologetic, in as much as one can be when you're sucking in every inch of yourself to squeeze past someone, though the theatre was still filling and we were far from the last to file in. The woman sitting beside me gave me a filthy look. Her companion was dressed in a sleeveless fleece gilet and a short-sleeved check shirt and he gave me a smile and made me feel sorry for her. He frowned at Andrew.

The play was fine. Good, even. Full of nuance, if that's your thing. It's mine, but I was busy luxuriating in the smell of the audience. They don't smell like the people you sit amongst in the cinema. Or on the bus. They smell warm and expensively perfumed, comfortable and well-dressed. They applauded the usher who clasped his hands in front of his breast and made a priggish speech about the use of mobile phones and pagers. They did not switch off their phones, but they applauded him again when he gave a second performance following the interval. He wore a dress suit and a beard and I wanted to hurt him. I do not normally feel so moved by announcers. The two calls missed and the text message audibly received during the play were not nearly as distracting as the audience's (to me) inappropriate bellylaughs and commentary throughout. "Driving Ned! That's what I know him from!" exclaimed one. David Kelly, star of Waking Ned, is some time dead.

After the curtain had fallen we left via the back stairs, the better to avoid the crowds. Skipping along Parnell Street, delighting in our relative youth and firmity, Andrew chatted about the play and I chattered about the audience. In good spirits, it was easy to ignore the woman who called "excuse me, miss" as we rounded the corner onto North King Street. I just looked the other way and carried on talking in that way you do when you realise that you have nothing more to say but you need to keep up the pretence that you're saying something and that this person is interrupting you. "Excuse me, sir" she said, trying for Andrew's attention. He ignored her. "Excuse me, miss" she said "excuse me, sir" and she hurried up the street after us. I walked a little quicker, and felt it in my knee. "Excuse me, miss, excuse me, sir, can you hear me?"

She caught up with us and Andrew asked if she was alright. She spoke to me, though. She knew I could hear her. She apologised. She said she was short €3 for the hostel. Andrew rooted in his pocket and found a €2 coin and she looked so grateful. She was dressed in a pristine white Adidas zip-up with bright pink piping and she had sparkly pale pink eyeshadow on her eyelids. She looked hollow. She was clutching a Cuisine de France cellophane bag of breadrolls and croissants with both hands but she released one to accept the coin and to shake Andrew's hand in gratitude. She shook mine too, and the grip of her hand was so tight and warm, clean and dry. She held my hand for a minute, and asked if we'd like some of the croissants that the man in the shop had given to her in exchange for the €2. "No thanks" said Andrew "you keep those" and she asked me again if I was sure and I said I was and she held my hand for a minute longer and thanked us both again and then we walked on, past the man who was waiting for her, ten paces ahead, a big black handbag slung over his shoulder and a vacant expression on his face.

People would break your heart, I said to Andrew, and we talked for a minute about how we see more people with addictions, living where we do, and stop less than we used to to talk with them or to share something. "And people who call them 'junkies', Jesus, I hate them" I said, and I then I said little else on the rest of the walk home and I went to bed hearing her, and him too, though he said nothing, and hating myself for I don't even know what yet.

With Your Feet In The Air And Your Head On The Ground

2013-04-30T21:17:00.001+01:00

I had lunch in the gallery today, then took a walk around to look at the paintings. You have to, really, don't you. You can't just get the large salad plate in the café and sit there reading your book with your sunglasses on your head and then fuck off to the park with a takeaway coffee. And you really can't eat in the café and then browse in the gift shop and fuck off to the park without visiting the art. So I did. I was more interested in the other visitors than in the masterpieces on display. I watched them carefully, especially the ones who looked like they were there alone and hadn't just come there to kill time before their hospital appointment. I tried to spend as long as they did in front of each painting, looking to see what they saw. But the only one that caught my eye was William Orpen's portrait of John McCormack. I have an eye for older men, grey-haired, creased, soft around the middle.

I like the bathrooms in the gallery. I took my time in the ladies', washing my hands, looking at myself in the mirror. The new freckles that smudge my cheeks and upper lip complement my curly hair and the heft of my hips. I look healthy.

I spent a while browsing in the gift shop but I didn't buy anything. I picked up each of the notebooks in turn, admired their beautiful covers and the texture of the paper inside but I have shelves of notebooks at home, all empty. Too busy hanging the shelves to fill the notebooks, I thought to myself, but that's not true.

I fucked off to the park then, with my takeaway coffee, and sat down on an empty bench. I sat right down the end of it to show the world that I am happy to share, and after a minute an elderly man in sandals with plastic shopping bags stuffed into their soles sat down beside me and offered me a cigarette. "No thank you" I said, though I really wanted one and I really wanted him to like me. "But please have one yourself. I'll be asked in a little while if I smoke and I have to be able to say no and mean it." He nodded and lit his cigarette. "It's nice here" he said "much more peaceful than Stephen's Green." We sat there quietly for a bit. He told me that he was waiting for his friend, Mary. That she'd gone for the cancer check and he was wondering how she'd got on. I told him that they can't tell you right away, that it takes eight weeks sometimes. "Is that right?" he said "she won't like that at all."

I stopped to photograph some flowers on my way out of the park. A cherry blossom tree and a broken street light, a bed of bright pink tulips. I knelt on the grass to take a picture of the tulips but it was damp and soaked through the knees of my grey leggings. The cold wet on my knees was such a surprise that I forgot to take the photo. The damp patches were another thing to explain to the nurse. She won't ask, they never do, but no sooner am I in the consultation room than I'm offering excuses for my knees, the mayonnaise on my dress, the yellowed bruises on my shins and thighs, the abnormal cells I expect they'll find again on my cervix. Because at the root of this is my fear that I am rotten, that something I have done has led to me having to present my self here every six months, making small excuses for this flaw at my very core.

Sinéad introduces herself and asks me for my date of birth and the correct pronunciation of my surname. She is impressed that I know the exact date of my last period. She notes it in my file and then recognises her own handwriting among the previous entries. "You're back on Thursday for the gynae clinic" she says. "I'm so sorry, if I'd realised then I could have spared you the trip and we could have done both on the same day." But I tell her not to worry. I needed the day out, the afternoon off. To have a smear done and then to sit and talk with a doctor about how I might someday somehow have a baby when I'm not sure I want to would be too much all at once, I say, and as I do a creeping rash crawls up my neck and flushes my cheeks and she looks at me with such sympathy that I think I might cry. She does the smear test, assisted by the tiny nurse who always enters the room like she's arriving at a party, and then afterwards she tells me that if this one comes back negative, I'll be able to attend the GP again instead of the special clinic. She tells me this while I'm standing there with no pants on, and I am grateful to her for not leaving the room while I get dressed, as if that might spare my dignity. "See you on Thursday" she says.

And so I left there feeling quieted.

Back on Merrion Square I passed a crocodile of students from Hedley Park, twelve three-and-four-year-olds tied together with string, the girls in straw boaters and the boys in school caps. People smiled to see them pass and to hear their chatter. They were like something from Madeline. I wanted to take a photo but of course I couldn't. Not of other people's children. So I took a seat on a bench instead and started writing on the back of the only paper I had to hand, a letter for a neighbour from VHI Healthcare mistakenly delivered through our door that I'd been meaning to repost for the last week. It seemed important to capture the image of the Hedley Park kids as they made their way up the street, the black leash wrapped around their wrists and bunched in their chubby little fists, the way they bumped into one another when their teacher stopped at the lights. I ran out of space on the envelope, and of reasons to stay sitting on a bench in the park. I called Andrew to see if he'd finished work. "Hi" I said "will you walk me home?"

Her Red Hair Falling Like The Sky

2013-03-08T16:29:00.000+00:00

I bought two bottles of red hair dye last week. I'm not really sure why. I was in Derry, in Superdrug, testing the cashier to see how many packets of non-prescription painkillers she'd allow me to purchase before referring me to a pharmacist or asking me to leave, and they just had this amazing display of endless possibility, a whole aisle dedicated to hair dye.

So I bought two. Two of the same dye, that is. They were on special.

I haven't used them. I put them on top of the bathroom cabinet, but then I worried that anyone who saw them there might assume that my hair is dyed when it's not, so I put them into the press under the sink instead. I took one out the other day and opened the packet and spread its contents out on the kitchen table and read the instructions and then piled it all back in again and hid it again among the spare toilet rolls.

It's not that I'm going grey (though I am). It's just,

I am worried that I will destroy the bathroom. I own it, you see, along with Andrew. I've never owned a bathroom before. It's stressful, owning your own bathroom. It cost us a fortune and, for a month, a cat. I don't want to streak the bath, the pristine white grouting, the badly-laid lino, with red hair dye.

I am worried that I will look brassy, and I am worried that brassy is the wrong word to use. I worry that I will not look like myself and that I will look better, not worse. I worry too much about things and I always have.

When I was fourteen years old it was all I wanted in the world to be allowed to dye my hair. My parents forbade it. My looking to be something or someone other than I was before I'd even grown into myself worried them. And they owned the bathroom. "Give me one good reason" said my dad. So I gave him ten. He kept them, all these years, and he gave me his permission. I spent a year dyeing my hair and the tips of my ears and then at fifteen, shaved it all off.

Now, at thirty two, it's crept back down to kiss my shoulders and I'm not sure what to do with it. I have two bottles of red hair dye and a reminder from my fourteen year old self that I should allow myself some frivolity and that I am still very loved.

Thank You It Was Great Let's Make Another Date

2013-03-08T14:46:00.003+00:00

Working from home on a Wednesday morning and having no pressing reason to stay in bed, I got up early and took a walk around Stoneybatter. I needed to go to the shop for milk, but I went the long way around because if all you saw of Stoneybatter in the morning was Tesco on Prussia Street then you'd never leave your room. I walked down through the houses with Andrew, kissed him goodbye on Manor Street and then walked back up the hill, past the shuttered shops and the kids on scooters, headed for school. Prussia Street was quiet. There were three men sat on the cold ground outside the post office, waiting for it to open. "Hello there lady!" said one and he gave me a gubby smile. I said hiya and smiled back and his comrade dug him in the ribs with his elbow. "She likes you, she does! Oh, she likes you!" I could hear him hoot as I walked on towards the supermarket.

I was the only customer in the shop. I walked through the carpark on the way out rather than back by the post office. The three men waved, calling me over. I waved back and kept walking. I stopped at the lights to cross the road just as the man who drinks at the bus stop on Hanlon's Corner walked out in front of the traffic. He had his 2 litre bottle of Diet Coke in his hand and his beanie hat perched on the crown of his head, the same expression on his face as he does when I pass him at half five every evening and he shouts hello and asks if I'd like to smell his finger. The traffic slowed for him and I braced myself for conversation, but he just crossed and kept on going.

The Valentines I Never Knew

2013-02-19T17:01:00.000+00:00

"You look like you've lost a lot of weight" my boss said, eyeing me up. I am dressed today in a cerise pink jumper dress and a pair of black leggings, and I am sweating slightly because underneath the jumper I am still wearing the vest that I wore on the ride in to work this morning. I wore the same vest in bed last night. I've been doing that a lot this winter. Taking things off only to put them back on again. I like the residual heat and the comforting smell of sleep that clings to the cotton.

"I haven't lost any" I tell her. I am not uncomfortable with our conversation, just practiced and a little resigned. She is interested in diet and exercise and discipline and control. I am not. We have had this conversation before. I have this conversation with a lot of people. This one and the baby one. Most of the time it's fine. I am open and frank and working on dropping the self-deprecation, which is as tired and unflattering as this bobbled cerise pink jumper. I haven't lost weight, is the truth of it. Not recently, anyway. I'm a little fitter than I was. "I've been cycling" I tell people, and then I bore the tits off them with tales of my triumphs over adversity on my bicycles. I have two now. Andrew thinks one of them is his.

My boss' comment on my weight is intended as a compliment, because she knows that I am self-conscious and that I would like there to be less of me. I have never told her that I hate being overweight, that I have always felt fat, that it has inhibited me socially, sartorially and sexually all my adult life. She can see it in how I stand, arms folded, or sit with a cushion clutched to my soft belly. It's stitched into the empire lines of the dresses I wear. Even if she couldn't see it there, she could presume. Because being fat is something to be ashamed of, isn't it? I don't know. I haven't read Fat is a Feminist Issue. I don't really read non-fiction. I would like to read a novel where the protagonist doesn't lose weight but feels better anyway. Some day I will write one.

I try to say "thank you" when someone tells me that my hair is nice or that my dress is lovely. I have a lot of hair and a few lovely dresses and anyone who compliments me on them does not really need to be told when I last had a haircut or where and for how much I bought my dresses. I hold compliments close and commit them to memory, turning them over and tickling their bellies when my own feels exposed and I need to feel soft fur under my fingers. And I try not to say "thank you" when someone tells me that I've lost weight.

I Gag My Mouth To Stop The Badness Coming Out

2013-02-09T12:41:00.001+00:00

"I don't like films about the end of the world" says Ann. Ann is the office secretary, a sweet-natured woman who practices reiki and prays to angels. We are very different.

I tell her that I like films and books about the end of the world because they remind me that I'm not the only one who thinks about it. "So long as the films aren't jumpy" I say "I hate jumpy ones." The end of days should approach with a slow, dreadful creep.

Ann can't understand why I would think about things like that. But there is comfort to be found in stories where people face unimaginable horror and loss. They are about how people manage. All kinds of unlikely people. Even when sometimes everyone dies at the end.

I don't know how well I'd manage, I tell her. I cannot run far or fast. I'll eat nothing but cereal if I'm left on my own for too long. I am not brave.

Ann doesn't think that I need to think about these things. "Nothing like that will happen to us" she says. I believe her. I don't really think the world will end while I'm in it. I just can't see it happening. I haven't watched Climate Change is Simple even once. Maybe it's because I don't have children. I have a separate bin for recyclables and I bring my empty bottles to the bank on Prussia St., but I don't care that much, really. I like flattening cartons and the satisfying smash of glass. I don't think anything I do makes a difference.

What I think about and try not to wait for is my end of days. Not the day I die, though I think on that too, but the day I am left bereft. The days. How will I cope then? I imagine, in the best of all scenarios, that I will eat a lot of cereal.

Our cat, Butters, strayed. He's home now so this part of the story has a happy ending and you can read on in confidence, but for a full month he was missing. It's been cold and wet and I went to sleep most nights imagining him curling himself into a tight ball and breathing his last and being no more. And it hurt me so much to think about that I could hardly breathe myself. I slept, though, and I got up in the mornings and microwaved porridge and made Andrew get out of bed and eat it in front of the SAD lamp. Because those were the things I could do to make a difference. I suppose that's how some parents feel about recycling.

I listen to Shelly Kagan's Yale course on Death and am reassured on the matter of my own, but I haven't stopped fretting about yours. I worry about being left behind. About not having anything to look forward to. I don't believe in heaven or hell or reincarnation or in any other life but this one. I haven't come to the chapter yet on how to live given the certainty of death. I don't want to skip ahead.

My sister boarded a flight to Glasgow last year where a little boy, about six years old, turned to his mother and roared "WE'RE ALL GAUNNAE DIE, YA STUPIT BITCH!" as everyone on the plane fastened their seatbelts and prepared for takeoff. His mother gave him a packet of crisps and he settled down. He'd said his piece and was content with his lot.

Today's title comes from Joe Chester's beautiful I Always Think You're Leaving Me. We saw him play in the Cobblestone last night. "Trevor Hutchinson really is dreamy" Andrew said. The whole gig was. But I know what he means.

Spots

2013-01-31T17:46:00.004+00:00

When I noticed it first I thought the cat had scratched me. He’s taken to kneading at me through the duvet at night and sometimes if his claws catch right through the thick tog I am left with small circular marks on my skin. The kneading is new. Otherwise I’d never have let him into the bedroom in the first place. The other cat, the kitten, went missing over a month ago now and though he never seemed to like him much, he must be lonely without him. And so he kneads.

‘Why do cats knead?’ I asked the computer. Because really, who else can you ask? I’m hardly going to call the vet. I’d already called to report him missing, even though he’s chipped and they’d be calling me if they’d heard anything. “Buh? Buhtters? Bootehrs?” said Tony when I called. “No” I said “Butters. Butters.” Tony and I have this conversation every time. Tony answers the phone in the surgery and makes small conversation with people and their pets in the waiting room. He wears a nurse’s tunic, thick glasses and two hearing aids and looks like there might be something wrong with his face. He likes to ask people what age their pets are. He knows what age they’re likely to live to. He is in mourning for his spaniel which died three or so years ago and he has told me twice now how he has kept all of her little outfits. Tony is perpetually wet-lipped with ghoulish compassion and I cannot stand to be around him, even over the phone.

Cats knead for comfort, apparently. Kittens do it when they’re sucking at their mothers’ teats. Adult cats revert to juvenile behaviours when under stress. I am reduced to Yahoo Answers.

I keep picking at it, this little red spot on my left middle finger, expecting it to flake away like a little scab. It’s slightly raised, when I run my thumbnail over it the skin around it puckers and I can feel a little pop when I scrape the nail over its surface. It’s not sore, or even sensitive. It’s just there.

I have others. I have one on my right breast, also red, larger than this new one on my finger. You’d need to be looking for it but if you were, I’d hope you’d notice. I have a cluster of black ones on my right temple. My pen freckles, I call them. I like to be kissed there. I have lost count of the number of times someone has told me that I have ink on my face, or wet a thumb and scrubbed at it, like I’m a grubby child.

‘What are red freckles?’ I ask the computer. ‘Cherry angiomas’ it says, and their number and size increases with advancing age. They’re also called Campbell De Morgan spots. I think pen freckles sound better.

My best friend in primary school was a boy called Shane who lived in our estate and liked dinosaurs as much as I did. Shane had a lot of freckles too and sometimes smelled a bit funny and could be just as cruel as other little boys but when it was just us or, more often, just us and my younger brother, he was quiet and kind and I liked spending time with him. We’d play Dinosaurs of the Lost World or read our books. My brother hated books, thought dinosaurs were stupid and was bored by the afternoons we spent with Shane. I’ve spent all my adult life seeking out the same easy, quiet company. But when we were put sitting beside one another in school, we’d draw on each other with markers. I was an unusually quiet student; diligent, conscientious, shy. The teacher could not understand why my hands, arms and legs were covered in multicoloured dots. Pen freckles.

Long after Shane and I parted ways, I kept drawing freckles onto my hands. In my twenties, unmoored from the bland relationships that had kept my confidence afloat during my teens, I started to mask my insecurities with mindless chatter. Like Tony and his dead spaniel, texting, tweeting, bleating, pressing up against your leg under the table and sliding my fingers into your palm. Embarrassed by myself, I’d ink a black dot onto the back of my hand to remind me how good it feels to be quiet with someone, to be silent and content in their company. I still do it, sometimes, to remind me of something I need to do, or to say, or to be.

When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple

2013-01-11T15:07:00.001+00:00

I could hear an engine idling outside. A low thrum. We were in bed. Warm. Intimate. He was talking to me, whispering in my ear, but I was distracted. Couldn't be outside our house, my car is there. And that's not my car. It sounds newer. But who sits with their engine idling outside Mrs. Brady's house at this hour?

I began to rehearse what I'd say to the ambulancemen.

We've only just moved in, I'd say, but then I'd ramble. Well, we moved in just before Christmas (two weeks before Christmas) but you know yourself you're in and out and then one of the neighbours had told us she was very elderly and sick and just out of the hospital so we didn't want to... and then I'd trail off because by then the neighbour who told us, Susan, would have heard my excuses from three doors down and she'd be out in her dressing gown and slippers and not a towel and a hoodie and a pair of Andrew's boots, and she'd be helpful, writing down emergency contact numbers for Mrs. Brady's nephew and her home help whose name I don't know. I've met her a few times, the home help, smoking on Mrs. Brady's doorstep. Happy Christmas! I said and I gave her my biggest smile when I ran into her on Christmas morning as I was leaving on my bike to visit my nana. I still feel the compulsion to tell people that I cycle places. Like they'll be impressed. Mrs. Brady's home help wasn't. Happy Christmas, she said, only I have to fuckin' work, don't I? I didn't know what to say to that so I just smiled a bit wider and pedalled off. On my bike.

What? Andrew asked. My gawpy kisses gave me away. I sat up in the bed. I'm just going to check outside, I said, I can hear a car. It's been there a while. It might be an ambulance. For Mrs. Brady. I spoke in a low voice and short sentences, the better to convey the gravity of the situation. Our elderly neighbour had just died, after all, and we'd never even bothered to call in and introduce ourselves. Now we'd have a dead old woman either side of our terraced cottage (Dolly died nine years ago in the house to our right and nobody has lived there since). Andrew cocked an ear. Do you mean the buzzing noise? he asked. Yes, I said. It's not a car, he said. You dropped your thingy on the floor. It's still buzzing. I reached a hand down and groped around in the dark, found it and switched it off.

Mrs. Brady lives.

Life Is A Lesson To Learn In Our Time

2012-09-14T11:50:00.001+01:00

As I cycled up Mobhí Road this morning I passed a man smoking a pipe and the smell of it and the smile he gave me made me wobble off my bike. I hurt my shin but it was fine, I was wearing my helmet.

The smell of the pipe smoke and the smile reminded me of my grandad, who died four years ago last March. I miss him and I don't. And I miss him. I am reassured by how life has gone on without him just like it will go on without you or me, and knowing that makes me swell with hope and feel terribly sad all at the same time. I miss him for my nana. Her love doesn't live with her any more and I think of how impossibly hard it must be to dress yourself every morning knowing that. And yet she does it.

I miss him for my mam, who misses her dad. I miss him for my dad, who he was a second father to, long years after his own father died. I never knew him.

I miss him for my husband, who he never met. He'd have liked him. He liked kind men and I can imagine how he'd have sat me down to tell me how much he liked Andrew and how proud he'd have been to see me marry him. He liked to sit me down to tell me things. He wrote me a letter just once, telling me why I shouldn't smoke. It was important to him. I smoked anyway, and didn't keep the letter. I really wish I had.

I'm crying now. Quietly, so that the secretary won't notice. It'd be too hard to explain to her that I'm crying because a man smoking a pipe smiled at me this morning and my grandad died four and half years ago.

I borrowed a bike from him in 2007. It was a loan; he was ill by then and couldn't cycle but he wasn't done with it. He never had a car. He learned to drive a delivery van when he was young but he and nana spent fifty-odd years going anywhere they needed to on bikes. This one, a silver Trek, was as good as new. I rode to work on it a few times. I locked it up in the underground car park of the apartment block where I lived and forgot about it like you would a promise to meet up soon, no really, let's not leave it so long next time. Next time was in 2008. I went to the car park to get it so that I could loan it to a friend but it was gone. I never told nana. I felt too ashamed, not that it had been stolen but that I hadn't noticed, or cared.

I bought a new bike last November, and started riding it to work this summer. I told nana about it, forgetting in my excitement that I'd never told her about losing grandad's one. She's been very encouraging, and will be very proud of me when I ride across the city to see her tomorrow and arrive with a pink flush in my cheeks and a heart bursting to show her how well I am, how well I've done, how far I've come, how much I love her. How I've a bruise on my shin from wobbling off my bike on Mobhí Road. She will understand why.

Janis Pity

2012-08-09T19:59:00.002+01:00

I spent a week working in the Grand Canal Hotel recently, sitting in on some stuffy workshops in an airless room, flogging a lame old horse. On the final evening I left as soon as was polite and took a walk down by some of my old haunts. Lower Mount St., Grand Canal St. and the basin, Love Lane, where I spent three years of my life. I don't feel that I really lived there. That I had any more substance than my reflection did on that Friday evening a week ago, flung back at me as I walked past the glass-fronted buildings.

I rented a room in an apartment there, in a soulless purpose-built apartment block where I knew the neighbours only by the smell of their dinners in the empty hallways. I'd just started in my first full-time job, just moved out of home. "Don't call me every day" I said to my mam. "I won't have any news and you'll think I'm just not talking to you." I was 24.

I made a point of not going home at weekends. I didn't want to make a habit of it. The apartment I shared was a charmless place, with cheap furniture and a bathroom mottled with mold. I hung fairy lights, sprayed it like a tomcat with Penneys-bought soft furnishings. Played at being houseproud. When I wasn't drinking or sleeping off a hangover, I rearranged the furniture. My dad started referring to the apartment as my "home" and I felt grateful and betrayed.

He and my mam visited me often, making as much of an effort to recognise my independence as I was making to establish it. I took them walking down along the cobbles on Clanwilliam Place, through to the new square that was being built at the Grand Canal Basin, and I felt proud then that I lived there, amongst all those new buildings, the steel and glass and money.

Most of the time, I didn't feel very proud. I felt like a fraud. I was lonely and greedy and young and I didn't know how to go about making a life for myself, a happier one where I didn't feel like I had to stay out all night or wax off all my pubic hair to prove that I was on top of everything and having the best time. I felt like things were running away from me. And so I started a blog.

I wanted attention. I wanted to capitalise on what I thought of (and still think of) as one of my more attractive abilities; my skill in framing a story. I told Regan about my walk back through those years over a cup of tea last week, and how all the suffocating loneliness I'd lived with there came bouncing back at me off every shiny surface I passed. He said he'd hate to live there. "I'd be on Grindr all the time" he said. "I know" I said "sure, I was".

I was referring to my blog, though there was that time I put an ad on Gumtree. I'd had a look at online dating sites but I wanted something honest. I got hundreds of replies, all of them pictures of penises. Well, maybe not all. I didn't look at them all. Some of them might have sent me photos of their wives, or their cats, or their faces.

Keeping a blog didn't change anything for me. I just blogged about staying out too late and getting too drunk and having all the hangovers and waxing off my pubic hair and having the best time. But I was taking the time to sit down and think about it, to put words on it. I wrote about myself in a flattering light, with just enough self-deprecation and vulnerability to be likeable. I left out the bits about destructive friendships and drunken text messages to ex-lovers, about comfort eating and penis photos from Gumtree.

But keeping a blog did change things. Getting older changed things too, getting sense and making friends and falling in love. I began to hold myself to account. I stopped writing as often on my blog. I began to live a little less like everyone was watching.

Walking back along Grand Canal Street last week, crossing the cobbles on Clanwilliam Place, ducking under the bridge and across to Grand Canal Quay, I remembered bringing my parents on a walk there not long after I'd moved to Love Lane, and being so proud of it. I feel embarrassed by it now. I feel embarrassed too by many of the posts on the blog. Well, I would if I had the stoutness of heart to reread them. Each time I'm tempted to delete it, I remind myself of the dearth of photos of me as a teenager. I'm old enough now to appreciate a few pictures of me as I was then, with my shaved head and bald confidence.

I noted the old streetnames as I walked along the quay, towards the river and the bridge to home. Misery Hill and Lazer Lane, Lána na Lobhar, lost now in amongst the elegant new buildings. Once the last refuges of lepers and lost souls hoping to make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, nowadays you pick your pilgrim's passport up at the brewery.

Review: The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

2012-04-05T10:17:00.004+01:00

Some pun on the dodo's name - Polly - and the film being a "cracker"

Yet another film in which Hugh Grant plays a scurrilous cad with questionable morals and floppy hair. But lo, they stuck a beard on him, and I loved it.

Andrew did too. He wants a manpanzee.

Mr. Bobo.