Fairytale of Forestside: The fourth circle of hell

Irish Times

3 hours ago

I've already booked my taxi for Christmas Eve!
It was still August, just – the last gasp of a summer that never happened. What fresh hell is this?
Margo thought as she swung round to see her Forestside heckler. She avoided the busy south Belfast shopping centre on Saturdays precisely because of the heightened risk of this type of enervating encounter.
No chance now of escaping a slew of Lady Eleanor's summer exploits, and a raft of smug highlights from the autumn schedule too. How did people get to midlife and still think it was all about them, still think they were in a film that everyone was watching, all the time?
Margo regretted the cappuccino she had quaffed earlier, felt the pressure in her wonky bladder as she half-listened to 'scéals' of super yachts in Downings, Best Dressed at the Dublin Horse Show, three generations in Marbs for three weeks, a spa break in Galgorm Resort to come down from all the carry on.
I'm raging, that buck eejit's gone and booked us into a mingin' inn for our Darren's weddin' in Eds
(Edinburgh? Margo winced at the abbreviation).
In a previous life Margo loved the pretext a food shop here offered; springing her out of her suburban home for an hour or two once a week. A sort of mini break or respite for wives who didn't get taken on business trips, or taken anywhere once they were 'taken' or 'spoken for': married. (
Poor Eileen, he never takes her anywhere. Not to the theatre, not to dinner, not abroad,
had been something Margo overheard her mother say of a favourite aunt.)
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Margo's parents had been date-night darlings for 60 years. Their
we were here first
mantra meant they donned their glad rags and set out looking for the heart of every Saturday night of their married lives. Margo stopped lobbying for this kind of life early on and, like so many women before and since who had married Mr Casaubon instead of Mr Darcy, she had learned to live around her marriage rather than in it.
This was her happy place then. It was all about lingering and longing and belonging, and still caring massively about the kind of dinners she was putting on the table, and about clothes and how she looked in them.
And about who she might meet and chat to about the PTA Dinner Dance, Nigel or Nigella's latest cookbook, the School of Music, the Transfer Test, the house extension or postcode upgrade, the fishmonger's number, the in-laws' visit, the book club's VIP Cinema Experience trip to see Revolutionary Road in the Odyssey (they had smuggled in Chardonnay and paper cups, on a school night, felt so spoiled and liberated in those large leather seats.
Somehow women understood that the next best thing to having it all was being perceived to be having it all. 'Having it all' was a tad too Noughties, so wellness gurus had replaced it with 'living your best life' – a less overtly greedy mission statement, but one that would ensnare another generation of women into exhausting themselves in order to at least appear like winners.
In many ways it was worse for women today. 'Doing it all' and 'living your worst life' seemed like more honest taglines for most of Margo's peers. Often illness, widowhood or divorce were the only chances they got to recalibrate and recover from the not so merry-go-round of so-called working motherhood. No wonder some felt nostalgic for the lives of their bridge-playing, hostess-trolley-pushing, marriage-bar mothers.
The energy she had wasted on all those little wins. He took your best years, Margo, her brother Frank would say
Where the f*** are you? How long does it take to buy a few nappies?
She remembered the staccato texts, remembered the hit of ignoring the 26 missed calls from her husband, remembered the nervy buzz of trying on skinny jeans in Oasis or dresses in pretty prints from Warehouse (husband and both shops long gone now).
Sometimes she would stash a furtive purchase in the boot of the old Saab. It might stay there, behind buckets, spades, windbreaker, tennis rackets, Frisbee, or under a Foxford rug until she could sneak it in, snip the label and slide it on to her wear-again chair as if it had always been hers.
Oh that old thing, I've had it for ages.
The energy she had wasted on all those little wins.
He took your best years, Margo,
her brother Frank would say in the aftermath of it all. Her mother, a scorched-earth Joan of Arc, liked to declaim,
If I had an axe I would cleave it through his head.
Margo's father, with all the kind ineptitude of a latter-day Mr Bennet, merely said that the best thing about marriage was that you could always get out of it:
In one great bound, my darling Margo, you are free!
Her maternal grandmother used to tell her that a neighbour in Shandon Drive, a Mrs Purcell, had negotiated a Fry's Chocolate Cream for herself every week with the shopkeeper on Doyle's Corner. Her regular indulgence would never appear on a receipt.
Margo guessed that her grandmother admired the woman's petty subterfuge and derring-do in 1940s Dublin: and that this was perhaps an early lesson for her in how a woman might prevail, however pifflingly, in a man's world.
Was Mrs Purcell a role model or a warning? If a woman took more than the paltry statutory maternity leave, or went back to work part-time, or not at all, she was still at the mercy of her husband's largesse.
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Margo could still see those good providers, sitting near the ladies' changing rooms in provincial towns, looking sheepish, but determined to oversee and sanction the seasonal purchase all the same.
These days, she viewed Forestside and all shopping centres (other than foreign ones, where a fish or cheese counter could still pique her housewifely instincts) as the fourth circle of hell. Yet, after 30 years, a certain camaraderie endured.
Her young neighbours would not know this dated feeling. They ordered the same food online from the same supermarket, from week to week and year to year. Margo would hear the trucks reverse in, beeping, engines running, and think of the unhappy humans in Over the Hedge, a film her children had loved.
There was good coffee too nowadays, and more recently and enticingly, a Waterstones. She had become a basket shopper again, only this time an M&S Meal For One felt like a badge of honour, rather than evidence of the sad-eyed, single-lady life of a character in an Anita Brookner novel.
Today she would just fire a Coke Zero and a microwaveable Chicken Tikka Masala & Basmati Rice into her old navy Longchamp tote, if only she could get Eleanor to stop blathering.
Eleanor couldn't seem to say a sentence that didn't have the words
ski trip
,
David Lloyd
,
hot tub
(
the size of a
sw
imming pool, it really is a swimming pool)
,
vintage Rolex waiting list, BMW luxury subcompact SUV, lobster season, air-miles, personal trainer, Dr Bonny, Camino
or
Prosecco
in it. Margo was exhausted at ski trip. Besides, it was still August, surely a little early to be chatting about Chamonix or Christmas Eve?
Here's me, yousins have no class, sure the cockapoos on the street know I have standards to uphold: in Belfast it has to be the Culloden, Dublin the Merrion, and the Balmoral in Eds. I says to him, I'll settle for it on this one occasion, but I'm scundered so I am ...
Mercifully, Eleanor's dog sitter called and cancelled at this point. Eleanor lost interest in her one-woman show and made to leave. Motherhood for Eleanor had been an episodic and socially expected inconvenience. She had buried three husbands and several dogs. The loss of the latter always hit her hardest.
Oh to be worried about doing a star jump. Carefree pantyliners now, please!
Margo feigned the disappointment expected of her and encouraged her old friend to get back to Burberry, her rescue dog du jour.
That's the second time Rupert's Granny Iris has died. Chillin' out hard indeed. Him and his beetroot coffees. Does he think I came down the Lagan in a bubble? The same as me new cleaners, cancellin' at the drop of a hat, off to Poland for three weeks at a time. Me head is melted! Adíos missus – did I tell ya I'm doin' me GCSE Spanish?
There were some people you were the better for seeing and others who left you feeling eviscerated; in Margo's experience, not all of the latter were women of her vintage, but many of them were.
She sometimes missed all the Bridget Jones drama of her younger years: the enormous glasses of Chardonnay and the simple joy of taking silly things so seriously. She envied Eleanor her lingering ability to get up about the light over when she was last photographed in the Ulster Tatler, or whether people could tell she'd had a boob job or that she'd been using preventative Botox since her 32nd birthday, or that her devotion to cream soft-furnishings had gone too far.
Alrighty, I'm away Margo. BTW, you look banjaxed. Yer not still workin'? Or are you just havin' a terrible menopause? You poor wee thing … Take care … You should get yourself up to David Lloyd in a Stella McCartney swimsuit. Treat yourself to some testosterone gel. Get you on the apps: talk to Rona (she dropped the 'B' after the divorce).
She's retrained as a padel coach, got herself an eye lift and some hair extensions down in Dublin and has only gone and met Comber's George Clooney, on Silver Singles. He has a place in Portstewart so he does. And no kids! I'm away on ...
Right now, Margo needed the loo. The brief hover and squat was not enough any more. The double void, advised her GP.
You have no control over the bladder muscle so it isn't your fault.
She had done her pelvic floor exercises, decades of yoga, park runs, coastal runs, sea swimming: all this before Covid turned the whole country into so-called Dryrobe wankers and wellness neurotics.
No, there was no little repair job they could do. There would be a lifestyle adjustment. Not the best news, but not the worst.
Margo said she was squeamish, could hardly take the dog to the vet, fainted when she gave blood.
There are no TV ads about stagnant ponds of killer wee … only armies of Tena ladies living their best lives. Nothing marketable about urinary retention. Don't see any opportunistic C-listers jumping on that unglamorous bandwagon. Margo just wanted to be a Tena lady too – smiling in plastic pants at heritage gigs with other leaking ladies. Alas, this rite of passage was not to be. Oh to be worried about doing a star jump. Carefree pantyliners now, please!
How did Margo, whom the silver fox in the post office in Ballyhack had just said looked far too young to be the mother of an adult human, end up wishing she was part of the 'pad up or put up' brigade?
Last week's urodynamics test had confirmed what her doctor suspected. Still, when the chillingly composed urologist said the line,
Would you like the nurse to show you how to self-catheterise now?
Margo felt it like a dump tackle.
She recalled her sister's rage when their doughty elderly mother had been discombobulated by an oculist (Lena had given him the sobriquet Dr Bank) on what she had thought was a routine medical visit:
When did you first realise you were going blind, Mrs Lyons?
Nothing routine about referrals. Still, Margo would get a second opinion and call the pelvic floor physio her sister had recommended. She was only 53.
Snipers' alley
, a colleague had called it.
Injury time, the departure lounge,
lifestyle-compromised,
had been her mother's phrases for these bittersweet years. There was a spate of scarifying midlife ailments: cancers, strokes and heart attacks, and then, if people dodged those bullets for the living forever generation, they seemed to be golfing, or at least driving, until 93 or 99.
Margo's yoga class was full of flexible but ancient beings who had made it through to the other side. She suspected that when their daily maintenance was done they napped until the next day's class.
Or maybe they ran up the Mournes. Maybe they were having the best sex of their endless lives, like celebrities in magazines who insisted ageing was for losers who refused to put the work in.
Some women were lucky or plucky enough to have opted for what was seen in Margo's day as the heretical, unnatural choice of an elective C-section, rather than the good-girl push and cut of an episiotomy in childbirth.
A quick Google search revealed that as early as 1985 the WHO recommended the abandonment of routine episiotomies; something about incontinence issues and painful sex in later life. Meanwhile, shame, pain and chastity remained the holy trinity of Irish menopause for another generation of mammies.
Margo was just stepping off the escalator when she saw her. If she was lucky Tara would turn into the posh Dunnes and succumb to a Paul Costelloe coat or a Catherine Donnelly jacket. No chance. Barrelling towards Margo, she whinnied:
Hey girl! Otis got 10 A stars and has been selected to play for Ulster under 18s, Auerila is off to do Med in Durham and Hunter has been paddleboarding with me in Helen's Bay, and doing jolly super post-op.
It was good to hear that the old golden retriever had rallied, his left side shaved and stitched after the sarcoma excision. Back on the water. He was such a sweet dog. But oh my days, those choreographed, perfect, boring, Hollister-model children, in their Lululemon and Birkenstocks, ordering oat flat whites and Buddha bowls in the claustrophobic confines of their postcode. Margo had tutored too many of them. She was sorry she didn't just nip down to Dunnes, but a ready meal meant it had to be Marks.
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You look terrible Margo. I gave you the name of my acupuncturist didn't I? I don't know why you are so resistant to Chinese medicine. You need to factor in some 'me time', girl, listen to some podcasts, move them glutes, as my Pilates instructor says. Bless. BTW, some friends whose kids didn't do as well as ours were looking for a tutor so I gave them your deets.
No pressure, but expect some drive-bys from the Gold Coast's finest. No, absolutely no need to thank me. My privilege, my pleasure darling. I'm all about giving back. Besides, that big old house won't heat itself. Defo doing Bay Tree coffee soon (post-pandemic side hug). Cheerio!
Margo had been on track to live what her pal Jean called the Italian boots-Land Rover Discovery-gym arms life of the BT9ers (hashtag-stay-at-home-girlfriend) until she wasn't. Her time in the gilded cage had been long enough for her to feel more than a smidge of compassion for friends like Eleanor and Tara, and the monstrous bubble that both protected and destroyed them.
Ladies who got to lunch rather than launch still had to attend to their perineum pain or their vulval dermatitis when either or both came for them.
Margo remembered Tara, in a rare moment of oversharing by the tills last January, saying that she found herself opening the little doors of her mostly adult children's Advent Calendars and gobbling the nativity characters that no longer mattered to them; gorging herself on the chocolate version of the Christmas miracle in a teary frenzy, in full view of the window cleaner.
Four years on from the death of her mother, Margo still savoured the memory of having been in this place with her
'There must be some kind of way outta here'
sang Dylan as Margo put her earbuds in and walked past what the papers were calling the best jeans in the High Street. Good for M&S. She had started listening to music or radio in supermarkets during Covid. It had made those dystopian shopping trips more bearable.
She smiled at Tracey, a member of staff she had known for decades, the older woman giving her arm a friendly squeeze as she bustled over to the till. Margo felt her eyes mist over.
Too heartbroken to return to the empty house after the first post-divorce Christmas handover, she had found herself driving up here. After crying in the dark privacy of the underground car park she had put on her nude pink lipstick, reapplied her blue jean eyeliner and wandered around, glad once again to have a busy, suburban, brightly lit refuge where she could stave off being alone, maybe even being lonely, for a while.
Four years on from the death of her mother, Margo still savoured the memory of having been in this place with her, however fleetingly. As shops, shoppers and shop fronts changed, the connections and the memories remained.
That said, the centre was no longer the hub it had been for Margo and her contemporaries. Nests had emptied, husbands had died or left, or were left, lifestyles had changed. The emergence of hipster local shops on the edgy but somewhat gentrified Ormeau, a revamped Asian supermarket and an excellent Dunnes foodhall on the embankment (full of Neven Maguire goodies, great Irish ham on the bone, and yoghurts from west Cork), were all making Margo and others vote with their feet.
She always bought her flowers from Marks. Lilies usually. You could take them to a wedding or a funeral. They celebrated and consoled. She mostly just took them home. Margo had been buying herself flowers for years, a decadent but necessary gesture (like the fire she lit most evenings). She liked the way they would bloom overnight or while she was out at work: enigmatic and majestic in the Judy Greene vase that held their elegant stems perfectly.
She looked at the headlines, picked up The Irish Times and The Guardian and moved across to the checkout.
The checkout girl, who was often working this late afternoon shift, looked so young. She always asked the same question in the same monotone voice:
Are you doing anything nice today?
No matter what answer you gave, the girl always said:
Well that's nice, so it is.
I'm going to look at intermittent self-catheterisation videos on YouTube,
smiled Margo
.
Well that's nice, so it is.
Sandra Kavanagh is a teacher and freelance writer based in Belfast