Cairo.*
The name was and is entirely unsuitable, one I would have had to wear like a bolt through my neck was it not for my father, God bless him. In a move that my mother would forever regret, she deputed him to register my birth, something that allowed him to pull one of only two known flankers over her in the history of their time together (the other was when he died to get away from her).
Afterwards he would claim that the middle name he gave me was that of a close friend killed in the war. He’d even take the trouble to look suitably mournful when he said it. Once, though, bending beneath a bonnet in his ramshackle old tin-roofed garage on one of our long evenings together, me standing beside him handing him his spanners, he told me he’d named me after his favourite car, a Riley Sprite he’d owned in the halcyon days of his youth, which translated means those days before he met my mother.
‘Lovely thing, she was. Four cylinder push-rod-operated overhead-valve engine.’
I assume he was talking about the Riley.
Thus I am Adeline Riley Gordon, but to all and sundry ever since (except, natch, my mother), Riley, not least because my father, keen to compound his crime and irritate my mother whenever possible – the revenge, raison d’être and principal calling of his married life – referred to me as that from Day One, firmly instructing my sister Cassie, three at the time, to follow his example.
In all this I count myself lucky. Not just because Riley suits me infinitely better than Adeline ever could (or, the horror … the horror … the appalling ‘Addy’), but because if I’d had the misfortune to be born a generation later, God knows, I might have had to put Golf or Mondeo or Fiesta at the top of my O level paper.
Anyway, I like Riley. It suits me. It has a jaunty, freedom-loving air that I like to think entirely encapsulates what I am. I think, I hope that, like Beatrice, a star danced when I was born.
‘Not from where I was looking it didn’t.’
Yes, thank you, Mother.
Anyway, I’m more than happy, just like Beatrice, to pay for my state by leading apes in hell when I die, this being the mythological punishment for spinsters, but one that holds no fears for me, coming of age as I did at a time and in a place where men were still getting used to the upright position. Confronted by the word ‘clitoris’, there’s still a few would guess at one of the lesser known Greek islands.
All in all I’d say the only downside, if downside there be to my name, is the jokes it provokes. Or rather, The Joke. Because there is only one. I’ve heard it a thousand times but, trust me, that’s not something that ever spoils the enjoyment of the joker.
‘Ri-l-ey …’ he’ll say, and I’ll watch as that geeky smile dawns and behind the skin of his face those old wheels and cogs start turning. ‘I suppose you live the life of Riley, then?’
And if you want know what all this Spinster’s Alphabet stuff is about I’d say it’s just that.
Because as a matter of fact, I think I do.*
* Answers in reverse order: Yes, No and How could we know?
* Author’s note: Cass was 29 and I was 26 by the time our father passed peacefully and gratefully away from our mother.
* Among many others. See B for Bridesmaids.
*As will be clear by now, the aim of this book is ever to inform. Thus you may be interested to know whence comes the term Life of Riley. It first appeared in a popular song performed by one Pat Rooney in 1880s America, ‘Are You the O’Reilly’, which describes all the things said O’Reilly would do if he was rich. Another song, ‘The Best in the House is None Too Good For Reilly’, shortened the name to the one we know and introduced the notion of R (e) iley as a carefree soul. The actual words the ‘Life of Riley’ appear in a third and later song, ‘My Name is Kelly’.
Faith and my name is Kelly Michael Kelly,
But I’m living the life of Reilly just the same.
With ‘My Name is Kelly’ the metamorphosis was complete. Reilly had become the idle, ne’er do well of popular fiction, and in particular of my mother’s morning newspaper for whom the phrase is indispensable, especially when applied to that vast amorphous body of people whose sole unifying feature is that they’re all somehow not just getting something for nothing but something due, by rights, to readers of said paper. This body includes but is by no means confined to:
single mothers
students
gays
lesbians
blacks
any teacher, vicar, lawyer, film or theatre director deemed by her morning newspaper to be ‘trendy’
anyone with a good word to say for the sixties
criminals (unless they’re actually members of the Tory Party)
and last, but definitely not least, anyone receiving Unemployment Benefit.
‘Scroungers,’ is my mother’s rallying cry as she waves her paper in the air. ‘On the dole. Lying in bed all day. Leading the Life of Riley.’
B is for … Bridesmaid (as in 3 times a …)
According to The Guinness Book of Records, the world’s most prolific bridesmaid is believed to be one Euphrenia LaFayette of Big Flat, Arkansas. A combination of a large family and lack of good bridesmaid material in her mountain home is said to have led to Ms LaFayette being called on no less than sixty-three times. Interviewed by the Arkansas Sentinel upon her retirement at the age of forty-four, Miss LaFayette said, ‘Ah been up that damn aisle in every kinda dress, n’ carried every damn kinda posy. I’ve had every damn kinda contraption on ma head too, and dang me, if a gal caaaint get tired o’ that sorta thang.’
Ms LaFayette has never married.
I lied.
There is no Most Prolific Bridesmaid category in The Guinness Book of Records. Which is a pity.
I could have been a contender.
When I told Cass about Mad Magda deciding to marry herself and asking me to be one of her bridesmaids, she said, ‘Well, it’s not like you don’t have the experience.’
It’s a weird thing when you think about it that once upon a time the best way to bless the bridal pair, to wish them good luck in their marriage, was to have them met upon the church steps by a raggedy, smutty-faced boy chimney sweep complete with pneumoconiosis and brushes.
