‘Would I be on telly?’
‘Granny …’ A note of warning has entered Neeve’s voice. ‘Don’t make me explain the internet to you again.’
‘No, no. No. I understand it. It’s magic telly for the young people.’
‘You’d be on my YouTube channel.’
‘I don’t want to be on that. The name is mean and – and rude. Imagine me having to tell people I’m on the Bitch, Please show. What does it even mean? Bitch, Please?’
‘I’ll show you,’ Neeve says. ‘Mum. Ask me if you can have all of this make-up.’ She indicates the dressing-table, scattered with a Tom Ford eye palette, a Charlotte Tilbury foundation, several contouring tools and three different lip colours.
Wearily I say, ‘Neeve, can I have all of that make-up?’
Neeve holds up the palm of her hand, side-eyes me and says, in scathing tones, ‘Bitch, please. See, Granny?’
‘No.’
Neeve smiles. ‘Come on, let’s go downstairs.’
Off they go to rejoin the raucous mayhem and I sit in the peaceful bedroom, smoke my e-cigarette and meditatively eye the dressing-table. That stuff would be wasted on Mum. Absolutely wasted. I inhale again and consider that it’s a very sorry state of affairs when you’re reduced to stealing make-up from your seventy-two-year-old mother.
Spurred on by my proximity to cosmetics, I decide to watch the latest on Bitch, Please, and see what Neeve’s recommending this week. There’s the option of asking her in person, I suppose but – and this is a worry – things feel more real if I experience them through my iPad.
This week is an autumn back-to-school special with the Grange Hill theme and cute title sequences featuring falling leaves and acorns – very pretty. And here’s Neeve, her long golden-red hair streaming down over her shoulders, wearing a crocheted hat, scarf and gloves in a dusty blue shade that makes her green eyes pop. In recent times she’s expanded to cover clothes and accessories as well as cosmetics and she’s caustic about ‘the shite’ she gets sent.
But these crocheted pieces are far from shite. They’re embellished with a scatter of Fendi-inspired leather flowers that are adorable but not over-cutesy and the overall effect is so gorgeous I actually groan. To think she’d got those things for free!
I rarely go into her bedroom because she’s an adult woman and entitled to her privacy. And I’m afraid I’ll lose my shit and start sobbing or trying to eat the lipsticks.
In my more fanciful moments I think sleeping in her bedroom must be akin to sleeping in a giant make-up bag – even though the cramped space is full of her camera, lights and computer, and the walls are lined with stacks of workaday brown boxes, everything as grimly efficient as a mini-warehouse.
Like in a job … because it is a job.
Not one that makes any money, though. Neeve’s rent to me and Hugh is paid using the barter system, by her joining in the house-cleaning we do every Sunday. (This double-jobs as family quality time.)
Her absence of an income is a worry. She has a degree in marketing from UCD, but instead of getting a job in some multi-national, like her fellow graduates, she decided that making vlogs in her bedroom was a viable career path.
And maybe it is.
Because the world is different from when I was her age, right? These days, kids experiment with several irons in the fire, and God knows Neeve works hard. Filming and editing the vlog is the tip of the iceberg. Most of her time is spent badgering advertisers or buttering up publicists. In addition, to keep herself in beer money, she hostesses two nights a week in some ‘skeevy-ass club’.
Now, on the vlog, she’s talking about new, exciting things in the make-up world, starting off with a primer from Marc Jacobs. She’s making it sound so great that my knuckles are clenched white with longing. Next up is a foundation and she’s less impressed with that. Oooooh. Not impressed at all. She delivers an entertaining rant on its failings, and ends by saying, ‘Aw, naw.’ She sounds just like a Long Island matron and she makes me laugh. She’s a natural comedian and manages to deliver negative reviews without coming across like a bag of bile. There’s a twinkle to her, a narky charm, and if only she wasn’t so spiky with me …
I know it’s for reasons she probably doesn’t understand but have everything to do with me no longer being married to her dad. And I’m powerless over that and powerless over her and powerless over everything, including Hugh going away, and I don’t like all these horrible feelings that I’ve no control over, and then I discover that the Marc Jacobs primer isn’t among the free stuff on the dressing-table, so I click to buy it and I’m furious to discover that it’s not available in Ireland and they won’t post it from abroad and the only place in London that sells it is Harrods and it’s impossible for me to go to Harrods because it’s like being trapped in an Escher painting.
Terrible memories of previous visits come at me, of going round and round, from hall to hall, every one of them filled with wired-up crocodile-skin handbags that each cost more than my car. Like in a nightmare, there’s exit sign after exit sign but a panicky certainty that the door will never appear –
Cripes, I’d better see how the dinner is doing!
Stealthily I relieve Mum of the Tom Ford eye palette, then go back down to the kitchen where Siena has managed to not burn anything. ‘I’ll take it from here,’ I say.
Vaguely she says, ‘Someone needs to bring the garden chairs into the dining room.’
There are so many of us that there are never enough real chairs to go round.
The front door slams again and this time it’s Jackson, Sofie’s boyfriend – he has his own key?
I suppose it’s no real surprise: he’s very much part of the family. Into the kitchen he wafts – there’s a lot of floaty-scarf action, skinny, skinny jeans and gorgeous, Versailles-style hair – and gives me a hug. I have to admit I miss him almost as much as I miss Sofie.
‘Sofie coming?’ I ask him.
‘Soon. Need anything done here?’
‘Aaah …’ Siena, drinking wine and gazing into her phone, seems to have no plans to fetch the chairs in. ‘Chairs from the garden.’
His look is wry. ‘You think I’m strong enough to carry them?’
‘Just about.’ Jackson’s weakling status is an on-going joke. ‘They’re only plastic.’
6
‘Hugh?’
No answer.
The house sings with emptiness, but it doesn’t stop me whirling through the living room, then the kitchen, then out into the ‘sun-room’ (a Plexiglas extension that’s Arctic from September onwards and in the summer months magnifies the sun’s rays so much that someone will eventually burst into flames).
Upstairs our bedroom is still and silent, the carnage from our busy week – discarded shirts and skirts and towels – frozen in artful crumples. It could be a painting: Life Abandoned Abruptly.
There’s no chance he’d be in Kiara’s room or in Neeve’s mini-warehouse or up in the converted loft where Sofie sleeps, so I check my phone. No text from him. With a sudden infusion of rage, I fire off a speedy Where r u? His six months haven’t started yet!
What’s called for is a trawl through the Outnet and a hefty glass of rioja – I don’t like how much I’m drinking but it’ll have to be addressed some other time.
To complete this happy tableau, I get my e-cig from my bag.