Can Anybody Help Me? Read online

  ‘Bought it with herself. Bad move. She left me with the mortgage when we split up. Stuck with it, now. You know how it is.’

  She didn’t, but nodded anyway. She had never done the whole property ladder thing. One of her few sensible decisions.

  ‘So sorry if the place looks a bit bare. Not a lot left in the kitty for furniture!’

  ‘Ah, no, it’s lovely.’

  It wasn’t really. They walked along a narrow dark corridor, half lit by a series of dim fluorescent bulbs. Someone had spilt what looked like a Chinese takeaway on the ground and she was glad of his arm as she stepped, wobbling over the mess.

  His door was painted cream, identical to the rest. Number 183. How many apartments were there in this place? And it looked like most of them were empty. He took out a key and fumbled for a moment. Strange, he’d only had a few pints. Maybe he was nervous.

  ‘You’ll have a glass of wine?’

  ‘Ah, go on, so.’

  The walk had sobered her up, but not so much that she wanted the evening to end. She wasn’t quite sure where she wanted it to go, really. She’d been out of the game for a long time. But there’d be no harm in a glass of wine. He went into the kitchen and she settled herself on the narrow corduroy sofa. He hadn’t been joking about the place being bare. Not a picture on the wall, nothing on the mantelpiece apart from a takeaway menu and a coffee mug. The ex must have taken everything. He was probably still getting over her too. Well that suited Miriam just fine. She wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. That certainly wasn’t why she’d come out this evening. But a bit of fun wouldn’t do anyone any harm.

  ‘Red okay?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  The sound of a cork popping, some rattling in the kitchen and then he emerged, carrying two large glasses. She took a big swallow and exhaled, happily. She had forgotten how good this felt. Tipsy, but not drunk, relaxed, but not too pissed. Aware of her surroundings. The cream walls, the wooden floor. The sigh of the springs as she settled further into the sofa. The space she left for him to come and sit beside her.

  The conversation was easy, a few gaps in places, but that was okay too. He chatted a bit about the ex, the problems he had with the heating in the apartment. She tried to stay away from the topic of Réaltín but failed. Showed him a few more photos, the ones from her wallet, the baby ones. He said he didn’t mind, just poured her another glass of wine. This time she savoured it. It was nice, feeling like this. Relaxed. A bit tired. But happy. Not drunk. But happy.

  Not drunk, but then drunk, or something like it. She sipped at the wine again and blinked as a fog enveloped her. Weird feeling. Distant. Strange. She shook her head gently. Drank wine a lot, at home. ‘Woush ent ushually get…’ She tried to say the words, but her tongue was too thick, too dry. Stupid. Headache …

  ‘Afther. Drinkingtoomuch.’

  ‘Ah, no, you’re grand.’

  Miriam shook her head again, trying to clear her brain. But the words wouldn’t come out straight and she could feel her eyes growing heavier, the fog descending. She coughed and tried to straighten herself up on the sofa. That was when she realised his hand was around her shoulder. It was firm. Warm. She resisted the pressure for the moment and then found herself curving back against him.

  And then he asked her a question. And she couldn’t for the life of her understand why he wanted to know that. So she laughed, and thought instead of her daughter.

  Baaa.

  What does a sheep say, baby?

  Baaa.

  She couldn’t say her name. But she was thinking of her, as the fog thickened and her eyelids drooped. She was thinking of Réaltín as they closed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Can Anybody Help Me?

  Della

  So there I was, 5am, up to my armpits in poo and wondering how to clean myself, baby and changing table without destroying the carpet … Thinking I have an Masters, dammit Ended up getting into shower with DS, changing mat and all and just kind of sluicing us both down. DH slept through it all of course, or pretended to. So if anyone has tips for getting poo out of bath towels I’d appreciate them … *sigh*

  Gleek

  Stain remover best for towels, the heavy duty stuff. LOL at DH snoring!

  AbbysMum

  Just wondering what you mean by you have an MA. Not sure what that has to do with anything. All babies poo and all Mammies have to clean it up. Sorry but thought that was weird thing to say

  Qwerty

  Thought that was strange myself AbbeysMum … I’m a SAHM, maybe cleaning baby’s bums is for the likes of us?

  Della

  Jesus girls, I didn’t mean

  ‘Hi, Honey, I’m home!’

  ‘In here.’ Yvonne looked up from the laptop, keeping her voice low.

  ‘Gorgeous day outside …’

  ‘Shhh!’

  ‘Sorry, hon.’

  Grimacing in an attempt to look apologetic, her husband flopped down on the sofa beside her.

  ‘Move up in the bed! Whatcha doin’?’

  The baby in her arms whimpered and Yvonne jiggled her gently.

  ‘Talking shit. Seriously, you wouldn’t be interested.’

  Closing the laptop cover, she dropped a kiss onto her daughter’s head.

  ‘Had a good day?’

  ‘Yeah. Grand.’

  It was a very Irish word, grand, and a very useful one. Still sounded kind of funny in her London accent, but Yvonne had been happy to adopt it when she moved to Dublin. Grand. Fine. Alright. Her day had been grand. The baby had fed when she was supposed to, slept when she was supposed to and pooed on cue. Not very exciting, and she certainly didn’t feel like giving Gerry a complete rundown.

  ‘Great.’

  Gerry yawned, his arm hitting against hers as he stretched and the child yelped, disturbed from her slumber.

  ‘Ah, not now, chick, it’s too early …’

  Yvonne hitched up her top and latched Róisín onto her breast in one smooth movement. Amazing what a bit of practice could do. Just five months ago she had thought breastfeeding was the most alien, difficult thing she’d ever had to do. Childbirth had been a doddle in comparison. But now, twenty weeks later, her boobs were her secret weapon in the war against salty baby tears.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘She needs another bit of a doze or she’ll be like a demon when she wakes up.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Gerry tried again, with a little more enthusiasm. Happy to have him home at something approximating a reasonable hour, Yvonne decided to let him get away with it. In her pre-baby life, she could never understand mothers’ obsession with sleep, getting it, persuading a baby to have it, bemoaning the loss of it. Now, she knew that the happiness of the entire family could depend on the smallest member getting enough of it. But Gerry didn’t spend anything like the amount of time she did around the baby, and it would be unfair to expect him to understand.

  ‘You’ll have a cup of tea?’

  ‘I will.’

  God, it must be Christmas. Yvonne smiled and allowed her body to relax back into the sofa as her husband headed for the kitchen. The baby, suckling slowing, drifted back to sleep in her arms. Life was good sometimes. Simple, way simpler than it used to be, but good.

  ‘A biscuit?’

  Ah, too good to be true. Gerry was love-bombing her for a reason. Careful not to disturb the baby, she raised her voice slightly so it would carry as far as the kitchen.

  ‘Babe, you are home for the evening, aren’t you? We said we’d get a takeaway?’

  ‘Yeah. About that.’

  ‘Ah, Ger …’ She could hear the whine rise in her voice, but she didn’t care. ‘You promised …’

  ‘It’s Teevan. He just texted, he wants us to throw out tonight’s running order, start again. We’re totally up against it. I’m sorry, babe. I have to be back in the office for six.’

  Gerry walked back into the sitting room, a cup of tea in one hand, a Jaffa Cake in the other. Yvonne thought for
a moment of the plates, unused in the drawer and then decided to keep her anger for a bigger battle.

  ‘You can’t keep working like this.’

  ‘I have to, sweetheart.’

  Gerry Mulhern was over six feet tall, but standing, looming over her with a melting biscuit halfway to his mouth and a lock of blonde hair flopping over one eye, he managed to look like a guilty schoolboy. As Yvonne glared at him, he pushed the hair back from his face, his blue eyes wrinkling against the blast of sunlight coming through the sitting-room blinds. It was the wrinkles that finally dragged her back from the brink of outright nagging. Yes, he was working like a slave, yes, he’d made a big deal about getting one of the assistant producers to take over to give them a precious evening together, and now he had to go into the bloody office AGAIN. But it wasn’t his fault. This was what they had signed up for. The whole point of moving back to Dublin, at a time when all the traffic was going in the opposite direction, was so that Gerry could take up this job. His dream job, the one he’d spent years in London working towards. Executive producer of Teevan Tonight, a current affairs programme that was rapidly becoming Ireland’s most talked-about television show.

  And so, if Yvonne was left spending most of her time alone with the baby, well, that was the price they had to pay. After all, it was Gerry’s new salary that was allowing her to live like this. She knew how stressed other women were, trying to juggle work and children, she read about it all the time on Netmammy, an internet discussion forum to which she was rapidly becoming addicted. She knew she was lucky, sitting in a fantastic house on a designer sofa, feeding her baby and keeping an eye on daytime TV while other women were battling through rush-hour traffic and panicking that the crèche was about to close. It was just she hadn’t actually realised, when they’d agreed to move to Dublin, just how much sitting around there would be, and how much of it would be on her own.

  Gerry was in the office most days at 10 a.m. and usually didn’t make it home until the programme came off air at midnight. Even when he was around he had one eye glued to the television, an ear cocked to the radio news and a finger permanently poised on the twitter app on his phone. But there was no point complaining about it now.

  ‘Why don’t we eat, so?’

  Realising the likelihood of a bollocking was fading, Gerry grinned, the lines from his face disappearing almost immediately. Yvonne could almost see his thoughts detaching themselves from domesticity and racing ahead to that evening’s meeting, where nappies and colic would be set aside in favour of opposition spokespeople and rating wars. She nodded, and he turned towards the door.

  ‘Great. Thanks, love. I’ll call for the takeaway now?’

  ‘Fantastic.’

  Yvonne wasn’t hungry. Róisín had slept for two hours in the middle of the morning and she’d celebrated with two slices of Rocky Road. The thought of a plate of chicken tikka made her feel queasy. Still, Gerry must be starving. She could keep hers for later. The baby was feeding all night at the moment, it would give her something to do at 2 a.m.…

  ‘… pick up my suit?’

  ‘What’s that, Ger?’

  Lost in thoughts of late night feeds, Yvonne had only heard the second half of the sentence.

  ‘My suit, the pinstripe. You said you’d pick it up today? We’re meeting the Minister’s people before the show; I need to look half decent.’

  Yvonne stared at him, blankly. ‘You never said anything about a suit …’

  Gerry closed his eyes, slowly, and inhaled. ‘I did, sweetie, we had a chat about it yesterday? It’s been in the cleaners for a week. You said you were going to the shops today …’

  ‘I’m just …’

  Yvonne could feel a headache prickle against her temples. The suit. A suit. She shook her head gently, trying to clear the fuzz. Maybe he had said something earlier, when he was leaving? One of those conversations, where her eyes were open, but she was just saying words. Words designed to stop him talking, basically. The baby had been awake since 3 a.m. and they’d both only dozed off at 6.30, five minutes before the alarm went off and Gerry had left to hit the gym before the workday began.

  ‘Sorry, babe …’

  ‘’S okay.’

  Gerry grinned and Yvonne could see again why Eamonn Teevan, the man recently nominated as the country’s most popular broadcaster, had brought his old friend home from England to lead his production team. Gerry Mulhern was a positive man. Things happened when he was around. One smile from him and everything would indeed be okay. The old grey suit upstairs could be paired with a dark shirt and it would look like everyone else at the meeting was overdressed and not the other way round.

  In her arms, Róisín unlatched and gave her a matching grin. Five months had passed and Yvonne still couldn’t quite get used to her husband’s face in miniature looking up at her.

  ‘Daddy’s girl.’

  She lifted the baby up gently and rested her against her shoulder, her hand massaging the tiny back as she sought the bubble of air that she knew was trapped in there.

  ‘My two girls!’

  Gerry sat back down on the sofa.

  ‘I’ll just see the headlines.’

  Yvonne smiled. He wasn’t the worst. The baby was wide awake now but content, it seemed, to lie still for another few minutes. Blissed out on milk and cuddles.

  Opening the laptop with her free hand, she returned to Netmammy and the conversation she’d been reading before Gerry got home. As she’d expected, the conversation had really taken off in the last few minutes. Four new messages had been added including one woman who told the original poster that she shouldn’t have had children at all if she couldn’t deal with the by-products. Ouch. That was a bit nasty. But there was a vicarious pleasure in reading the argument, all the pleasure of eavesdropping on a row between strangers, without the slightest risk of being caught.

  Yvonne’s eyes flickered to the top of the page, where a list of the Netmammy members currently online was written in bold. Her own name, LondonMum, was there, but there was no sign of MyBabba. Strange, she was usually first to jump in when the threads got heated. It was one of the reason Yvonne liked her, she had a cool head and could always be relied on to say ‘calm down girls’ or ‘let’s just remember we’re all Mammies together’ when it was needed. She’d been a great help to Yvonne too, in the early days when it felt like Róisín was either feeding or crying twenty-four-seven and Gerry had been too busy or too absent to help. It was crazy really, she had never met the woman, had no idea of her real name, but she thought of her as a friend. Or at least the closest thing she had to a friend in Dublin. There was no sign of her today though. Probably off having a real life.

  Della was back online now, making an abject if slightly insincere apology for implying that there was anything wrong with changing baby’s bums.

  Boring. An apology always took the heat out of the conversation. Yvonne slid the computer off her lap and focused her attention on the television. She’d never watched the news when she first moved to Ireland. Couldn’t understand it for a start. Most of it seemed to consist of men arguing with each other about banks, and members of political parties with names she couldn’t pronounce competing for jobs she couldn’t spell.

  But Gerry wouldn’t miss a bulletin and Yvonne had had no choice but to become interested. At least it gave them something to talk about on the odd occasion when they were at home and awake at the same time. She leaned over and turned up the sound as the theme tune ended and the blonde newscaster leaned into the camera. A photograph of a dark-haired woman was positioned over her left shoulder.

  ‘Gardai have issued an appeal for information following the disappearance of a woman in Dublin at the weekend. Twenty-six-year-old Miriam Twohy, who has one child …’

  Yvonne winced and looked down at her baby. Poor woman. That would teach her to be whingeing about being left home alone. Some people had it really hard.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘I think it’s her.’


  ‘Oh, come on, Yvie, it’s a bit of a bloody leap.’

  ‘Not really, look at the kid’s name? It’s hardly common, is it? Réaltín? MyBabba’s daughter’s called Réaltín, she never put it on the site, but she told me in one of her PMs.’

  ‘PMs? What, you into politics now as well?’

  Yvonne removed the phone from her ear and moved her head slowly from side to side in an attempt to dissolve the ache that was building up in her neck. She stood up and walked across the sitting room to where the baby was, she hoped, fast asleep in her pram. The little chest rose and fell gently; the blue-veined eyelids were tightly shut. Excellent. Keeping her voice low, she spoke into the phone again.

  ‘A PM is a personal message, like an email. It doesn’t go up on the main site, only you and the other person see it.’

  She and MyBabba had in fact exchanged several messages about breast pumps and how to ward off mastitis, but she knew Becky well enough not to go near that particular topic of conversation.

  ‘I don’t know, Vee, I mean it’s Ireland, isn’t it? All the names sound mad to me. No disrespect, but look at the name you picked. Roisin? I can’t hardly pronounce it, let alone spell it!’

  Yvonne took a deep breath.

  ‘It’s really common over here, it means little Rose. Gerry chose it.’

  It would be very easy to get offended right now, she thought to herself, but counterproductive. Rebecca didn’t get much time off during the day; if she hung up now, it could be days before the combination of sleeping baby and friend on lunch break happened again. She settled back into the large grey sofa. She still couldn’t believe she lived somewhere like this. Bay windows, lightly varnished wooden floors … it was about as far from her London flat as could be imagined, like a feature in the Sunday Times magazine. But her husband had convinced her they could afford it. In fact, it had been the house, and Gerry’s insistence that it was right for them, that had helped her make the decision about Dublin in the first place.