my parents, which was why they felt the need to go out shopping for another daughter, as I’d seen it at the time. It had hurt me as a little girl, hurt me far more deeply then I ever let on, and to this day remains a searingly vivid memory, one that still has the power to sting even now, from a safe distance of decades. Coming home from primary school to be told by Dad that there was a ‘surprise’ waiting for me in the good front room. Course I was all excited at first, then bitterly disappointed to discover nothing other than my battered old cot with a new baby sleeping in it. I’d thought at the very least that I was getting a new home computer or a maths set. Something useful.
As time went on though, I realised the truth; that Mum and Dad had just brought home what appeared to the five-year-old me to be an improved version of what a little daughter should be. One who grew up to be pretty and blonde who lisped and giggled and wore pink and got invited everywhere. And although they’d die rather than admit it, one who they both clearly preferred; to this day, I can still hear the three of them happily laughing and messing about while watching some TV programme together night after night, like a proper family. All while I sat all alone upstairs in my room, getting ahead on the next day’s homework and trying to choke back hot, furious tears at being so blatantly excluded. Five years old was a young age to learn all about rejection, and yet that’s exactly what I had to do.
Course years later, after several gin and tonics, my mother has told me that this actually wasn’t the case at all; that she and Dad were if anything just utterly exhausted and worn out by all the various demands involved in rearing a child genius – the special tutorial classes, the constant IQ tests, the violin/cello/clarinet lessons, the way I never seemed to need sleep for more than a few hours, instead reading book after book throughout the long, lonely nights.
According to Mum, they could deal with all that though; what worried them was always hearing that other kids in my class were organising birthday parties for their friends, trips to the movies or else days out to the zoo, none of which I ever seemed to be invited to. But once they adopted little Helen, all that changed for them; because this, thank God, was a more normal child, one who failed maths tests and struggled with her reading, but who was bubbly and friendly and perennially popular; forever getting invited out on play dates and sleepovers with all the other kids in her class. The complete polar opposite to me, in other words.
And now here we are, living under the same roof together, for the first time since we were teenagers. Except now, instead of feeling old pangs of childhood jealousy towards her, all I can think is, this girl really must be some kind of walking saint. I can’t describe just how hugely grateful I am to her for doing this and for putting up with me, when not many would. Grateful to her for dropping everything to help me out in my hour of need, though I did insist on paying her far more than I ever paid Elka, stressing that this was just a temporary measure till I found someone more permanent. (Not an easy task, given that I’ve been blacklisted by just about every nanny agency in town.)
‘Hi, I’m home. So where’s Lily?’ I ask, still breathless from the mad dash to get back to see her and knowing full well what the answer will be. The house is way too quiet, for starters; course she’s already in bed.
‘Asleep hours ago,’ Helen smiles sweetly up at me from where she’s sprawled out in front of the TV, eating Haagen-Dazs straight from the tub. ‘Oh you should have seen her in the bath! She was so adorable! We had the BEST fun. Then she got into her little pink sleeper suit and insisted on me reading Sleeping Beauty to her … You know that’s her number one story now? And her new thing is that as soon as I’ve told it to her, she has to tell it back to me. She’s completely word perfect, her memory is just incredible you know, almost photographic, just like yours …’
Helen happily chatters on while I stand rooted to the spot, fixing her with a borehole stare. No, I did not know Sleeping Beauty was now Lily’s favourite story. Or that she likes to tell it back to you as soon as you’re finished. I knew none of this; how could I? The one night I can get away from work relatively early to see her, I’m already too late.
‘I really wanted to do all that with her,’ I tell Helen, as a flood of disappointment suddenly makes me irrationally snappy. ‘Just once, just for tonight. I nearly crashed the car I rushed home that fast, I had to spin a pile of stories even just to get away this early …’
‘But it’s half eight at night!’ Helen insists. ‘The poor little thing was exhausted. We’d been to the park earlier today you see, to feed the ducks and the weather was so fine, we stayed there much longer than I’d planned. Then we came back here and had dinner, and of course by then, she was practically falling asleep into her spaghetti hoops. So what else was I to do?’
I give a long, defeated sigh and tell her it’s okay, it’s not her fault. I was just looking forward to seeing my little girl, that’s all. But she knows me of old and knows only too well when to pay no attention to me when I’m ratty from sleep deprivation, so she quickly goes back to her TV show.
‘By the way, Sean called for you today,’ she calls over to me cheerily from the sofa as I tear open the post from the island in the centre of the kitchen.
‘Who the hell is Sean?’
‘Oh you know Sean, he’s the FedEx guy. Left a package on the hall table for you. He says he’s been delivering to you for years. Such a sweet guy; do you know he has a daughter exactly Lily’s age with another one on the way?’
Vintage Helen, getting pally with all around her, entrancing everyone she meets with her natural charm and old-fashioned niceness. In the space of a few days, she’s also befriended the cleaning lady over big, bonding mugs of tea and whinges about the respective men in their lives, not to mention the gardener, who she’s now on first name terms with as well. Whereas the sum total of my knowledge about the cleaner is that her first name is Mary and that she has the permanently disappointed look about her of a woman whose husband left her for someone younger, but not before transferring all his assets into an offshore account. Wait and see though, I bet before the month is out Helen will end up going out on a drunken girlie night in Temple Bar with the cleaner and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she ended getting invited to the gardener’s house for a Sunday roast.
Not that I’m holding any of this against her, it’s just a constant daily reminder of our sibling relationship; I’m permanently cast in the role of bad cop against her perennially popular good cop. I’m the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West to her Glinda, the Good Witch in the meringue dress that everyone loves and gravitates towards and wants to hang around with. This was our central casting as kids and this, it would seem, is how we still are.
Then there’s the fact that she seems to be in constant and daily contact with our mother and feels the need to tell me this all the time. Now every family has someone like Helen; the glue person. The one who tries their level best to keep each one in check and fully informed about everyone else, no matter how much indifference and how many shrugged shoulders they come across. Since she moved in, Helen’s forever passing on little titbits of news, like, ‘Guess what? Mum’s just gone and bought a lovely new patio set for her back garden. The wooden one she had just fell apart after all that rain they had recently in Marbella, and you know how she’s had her eye on a cast iron one for ages now …’
Have I ever had a conversation with my mother regarding patio sets? Didn’t even know she had a back garden. Last time I had a decent conversation with her was over a week ago and even then, she was only ringing up to talk to Lily.
Ahh, Lily. It seems that even a small child isn’t immune to Helen and her Miss Congeniality charm offensive. I’ve never seen anything like it; Lily took one look at this shadowy figure who she vaguely remembered from Christmas dinners, not to mention all the birthday cards and gifts that had been posted up from Cork over the years, and instantly idolised her Auntie Helen, practically
