Pack Up the Moon

  Anna McPartlin

  * * *

  PACK UP THE MOON

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  To my mom

  who taught me how to find the smallest glint of light

  even in the darkest of places.

  To Mary and Tony O’Shea

  For being my parents.

  To Hallie

  just ’cos …

  Chapter 1

  The Thin Blue Line

  It was early March and raining. The clouds were relieving themselves with a ferocity akin to a drunk urinating after fourteen pints. I looked through the frosted glass, imagining the impact the downpour would have on my whites blowing wildly in the accompanying gale. Then back to the floor, immediately noticing the slight yellowing in the grouting around the toilet.

  Men, I thought. How hard is it to aim for the loo? I briefly contemplated how it was that my boyfriend could manage to clear a pool table with pinpoint accuracy, park a car in a space the size of a stamp and yet when it came to pointing his mickey in the direction of a large bowl, he had the judgement of a drunken schoolboy. The edge of the bath felt cold under my skirt.

  Three minutes.

  Three minutes can be a long time. I wondered would it feel so long if I were defusing a bomb. I started to count the seconds but quickly lost interest. The mirror needed cleaning. I’d do it tomorrow. I absentmindedly played with the stick in my hand until I remembered that I’d just peed on it. I put it down. I brushed invisible fluff from my skirt, this being a habit I had picked up from my father although obviously he was not a skirt-wearer. It was our response to nerves. Some people wring their hands; my dad and I cleaned our clothes.

  The first time I really noticed our shared trait was when my brother, aged seventeen, announced that, instead of becoming the doctor my parents had dreamt of, he was going to become a priest. My mother, mortified by the thought that she would lose her son to an absent God, spent an entire evening screaming shrilly before breaking down and taking to her bed for four days. My dad sat silently cleaning his suit. He didn’t say anything but his disappointment was profound. I remember that I wasn’t too pushed at the time. As a self-obsessed teenage girl, I didn’t share the same concerns about Noel’s sacrifice as my parents, although I admit that the thought of having a priest in the family was slightly embarrassing to me.

  We weren’t very close then. He was your typical nerd, bookish, intense and politically aware. He studied hard, brought out the bins without being asked and was an ardent Doctor Who fan. He never smoked, never indulged in underage drinking or for that matter in girls. For a while I thought he was gay, but that theory passed when I realised that to be gay you had to be interesting. Still, we were adults now and, although I could never understand his utter devotion to The Almighty, times had changed and all the traits that made for a nerdish teenager guaranteed a fascinating adult. I now counted Father Noel as one of my best friends.

  Two minutes.

  I was twenty-six years old. I was in love and living with John my childhood sweetheart. I had the pleasure of watching my lover grow from a fair-haired, blue-eyed, idealistic boy to a fair-haired, blue-eyed, self-assured man. We’d been together nearly twelve years and for me he was definitely The One. We’d been living together happily since college. We were renting a nice place – two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a cute sitting-room – just off Stephen’s Green and although it was small and sometimes smelled of sweet old lady, it wasn’t that expensive which was amazing considering the location. I had a good job. Teaching was never my life’s dream, but then I considered myself lucky to have been unburdened by ambition. Teaching seemed as good a job as any. Some days I liked the kids and some days I didn’t, but it was steady. I was home most days by four thirty and I had three months off in the summer. John was still in college doing a PhD in psychology, but he also managed to hold down four shifts a week as a bartender. Some weeks he’d bring home more money than I would and he maintained that he learned more from drunks than he would in college.

  We were happy. We were a well-adjusted happy couple. We had a good life, good prospects and good friends. There are a lot of people who would like to have the kind of security we had with one another.

  One minute.

  My mother had often pondered aloud as to when John and I would think about marriage. I’d tell her to mind her own business. She’d note that I was her business. We’d fight about the issue of privacy versus a mother’s love. At twenty-six I felt too young to marry and this feeling remained, despite my mother constantly reminding me that she had two young children by the age of twenty-four.

  “It was a different time,” I used to say and that was true. Most of my mother’s friends were married with kids by the time they reached their mid-twenties. I was from a completely different generation. The Show Band versus the MTV generation. While she grew up on Dickie Rock, I gyrated to Madonna. Before meeting my dad, her idea of a fun night out was lining up against the wall at the local dance hoping one of the lads would pick her for a waltz. I, on the other hand, was from the disco generation. Besides, none of my friends were married.

  Thirty seconds.

  OK, that’s a lie. Anne and Richard met in college. She was the middle child of a middle-class family from Swords. He was the son of one of the richest landowners in Kildare. They met in a queue to sign up for an amateur drama group during orientation week. They got talking, abandoned the queue to get coffee. After that, they were inseparable. They married a year after college. Big deal, they were the only ones.

  Clodagh, my best friend since age four, hadn’t managed to hold down a relationship over four months. She had emerged from college a tenacious, intelligent, hardworking career woman, managing to work her way up to Senior Account Manager of a large advertising firm within three years. She succeeded in all she did, with the small exception of her romantic life, and that perceived failure hurt her.

  Then there was John’s best friend Seán, dark, brooding, dry and beautiful. Clo called him “the living David”. He had not only made his way through eighty per cent of the girls in the Trinity Arts block, he’d also managed to nail a few lecturers along the way. His longest relationship to date had been with an American girl called Candyapple (her real name, I kid you not) during a summer we all spent working in New Jersey. She was your typical coffee-skinned, brown-eyed, big-breasted, small-waisted nightmare. She had long curly brown hair that somehow reminded Anne of the Queen guitarist Brian May. Seán called her “Delicious”; the rest of us called her “Brian”. They lasted six weeks. He left college and after a few false starts he fell on his feet, landing a job as editor of a men’s magazine. His quick wit, sincere worship of football and encyclopaedic female carnal knowledge ensured his continuing success. Relationships didn’t matter and marriage and family certainly was not a priority.

  Ten seconds.

  John loved our life. You know those smug couples you meet and instantly hate. He could be smug like that. He never seemed to care that Seán
had his pick of women through college. He didn’t even mind that he had only ever had sex with one person. He was content, loved up, happy. He was rare. We were rare.

  The first time we had sex we were both sixteen. We were in a tent on the side of a hill in Wicklow. It was a warm summer night, not a cloud in sight. The moon was full, round and bright, the sky was navy and thick like velvet, the trees were towering, leafy and smelt of sun. No wind, no breeze, the world seemed still. We had our little campfire, a picnic basket, a packet of condoms and a bottle of wine, which we both merely sipped, our underdeveloped taste buds mistaking its fruity freshness for the taste of rancid crap. Kissing turned to cuddling, which turned to snuggling, which led to nuzzling, graduating to feverish genital rubbing and one hymen later we were lying in one another’s arms looking up at the fag-stains on the blue nylon tent, wondering what all the fuss was about.

  Clo had warned me that practice made perfect. We managed it four times before we returned to our respective parents, proud and full of secrets.

  Five seconds.

  I wasn’t ready. I felt sick, praying it was stress-related and not morning sickness.

  Oh fuck. What will I do? I don’t want to be a mother. I don’t want to be a wife. I don’t want to feel like I’m my mother before I’ve lived. I want to do things, I’m not sure what. I want to experience different places, I don’t know where. I’m not ready.

  I hadn’t mentioned to John that my period was over two weeks late nor had I mentioned that I had bought a pregnancy test. I wasn’t used to keeping secrets from him but I was sure that I was right not to involve him in this.

  Why worry him?

  The problem was I wasn’t sure if he would be worried. He smiled when my mother teased us about marriage and babies. He’d take time in a supermarket to stop and smile at a dribbling child, while I would push through the throng, impatient with everything bar getting what we’d come for and leaving.

  Two seconds.

  He would be excited, I could feel it in my bones. Worse than that, he would want the baby. There would be no furrowed brows or tearful decisions to be made. There would be excitement and planning and books and baby clothes. My stomach started to hurt.

  I’m not ready.

  My hands were shaking as I turned the stick.

  Please don’t be blue, please God, don’t be blue!

  My eyes were closed although I don’t remember voluntarily closing them. I sighed deeply and this reminded me that I was a smoker so I lay the stick down and ran to my bedroom to grab a packet of cigarettes. I returned and lit up. I inhaled deeply, determined to enjoy what could be my last cigarette for a long time. My intention was to finish the entire cigarette before unveiling my future. However, this plan was obliterated by the sound of John’s key in the front door. I hastily put the cigarette out by dousing it in cold water with one hand while waving madly with the other in an attempt to dissipate the smoke, which seemed to billow around the confined space. I could hear his footsteps make their way upstairs and towards my hideout. I was out of time.

  “Emma!”

  “I’m in here!” I called, a little too shrilly.

  He attempted to open the door. I watched helplessly, hiding the stick up the arm of my jumper. It was locked. I sighed with relief.

  “Why’s the door locked?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I always lock the door,” I lied, hoping he’d momentarily lose his memory.

  He didn’t.

  “No, you don’t,” he said, still pushing down the door handle.

  “John,” I said sternly, “can you just give me a bloody second?” I could hear him walk toward the bedroom. He was mumbling something about me being a bitch when I had my period.

  I wish.

  I sat back down and turned over the stick. I looked at it for the longest time. I closed my hand over it and then I looked again. I bit my lip, hurting myself in the process. I opened my fingers again, revealing a gloriously white window. Not a hint of blue. I moved to the window to ensure maximum light. Nothing. It was clear. No blue line. I had my life back. I wasn’t pregnant. I wasn’t even a little bit pregnant. I was just late and I had a party to go to.

  Thank you, God!

  * * *

  When Richard’s grandfather died at the age of ninety-one, he left a very large portion of his estate to Richard, making him extremely wealthy. To this end it was decided that there would be a party to celebrate, an “inheritance party”. Anne was initially concerned that it would be in bad taste.

  “He was a very old man, who died after living a great life full of love and achievement. Why would having a party to celebrate your good fortune be disrespectful?” I had asked her.

  “It’s been so long since we’ve had a party,” was John’s contribution to the cause.

  “Besides, my granddad had a great sense of humour. He’d love the idea,” Richard intoned, desperate to enjoy their new fortune.

  “It’s a fantastic idea! We can celebrate his life and the fact that our good friends are loaded,” Seán insisted.

  Eventually Anne succumbed and so it came to pass that the day I discovered I would not bring a new life into the world was the day that my world changed forever.

  * * *

  I thought about writing to you for such a long time. I never actually dreamed I’d get around to it, but when I did, it seemed so easy. Memories are absurd things. Some are vague, some crystalline, some too painful to recollect and some so painful it’s impossible to forget. Happy times are remembered with warmth and laughter, recalled as an anecdote in the pub, exaggerated for the crowd. The really good ones keep you company on an otherwise lonely evening. The clearest memories are of those occasions when you experience great highs or lows. It’s the emotion the situation inspires that you remember. That feeling of incredible exultation or terrible despair enables your brain to note the details that normally pass you by like the colour of someone’s shirt, a hand gesture or how warm or cold it was.

  You can recall the creases caused by the smile on a loved one’s lips or the way tears crept from their eyes. But pain is hard to put into words and in life there is always pain. It’s as natural as birth or death. Pain makes us who we are, it teaches us and tames us, it can destroy and it can save. We all have regrets – even Frank Sinatra had a few. Some tragedies are of our own doing and then sometimes things happen that are out of this world’s control and when it happens, it can take our breath away.

  Happiness is a gift. It washes its warmth over us and reminds us of beauty. It should never be taken for granted. I should never have taken it for granted. That thin blue line represented happiness. I didn’t know that it would later represent something that I would never get back. But then I wasn’t ready.

  Chapter 2

  Space-Hoppers, Cigarettes and Lipstick

  My little drama concluded, I was now in the bath trying to wash St Fintan’s secondary school away. Despite my good fortune I was in a bad mood and not looking forward to the party that I had partly instigated. The door unlocked, John entered and his grin suggested that my earlier outburst had been forgiven.

  “Can I wash your back?”

  I told him to piss off.

  “Will you wash my back?”

  I gave him the fingers.

  “Ah, the little bastards gave you a hard time,” he laughed.

  “Don’t call my students little bastards!” I admonished.

  “Why not? You do. Besides, when they piss you off, I have to live with the consequences, so I feel I have a right.”

  He was right.

  “Alright, I’ll allow you to cheer me up,” I grinned.

  “That’s good of you,” he said, kneeling on the floor and playing with my bath water, his eyes glinting.

  I melted. “OK then. Get in but don’t push me into the taps,” I warned.

  His clothes were off almost before I got to the word “taps”. He sat in behind me and we lay in the warm water, his arms around my gloriously empty s
tomach and the water sloshing over the side. I let some out, leaned back and asked him how his day went. He responded by telling me about a fantastic psychological test that he had pulled off the net and I was instantly sorry that I’d asked.

  “It’s great – I’ve got to do it on you,” he threatened.

  I looked around at him. “That’s sexy,” I said.

  “It’s great – it’s a laugh. But you’ll need some paper.”

  “I’m in the bath,” I pointed out while trying to get comfortable.

  He started to wash my back. “It’s very telling,” he said ominously.

  I told him that, after six years, I was under the impression he knew everything there was to know about me. He smiled smugly.

  “There’s always more, Em. Sometimes we don’t even know ourselves. Like for instance, until yesterday I didn’t know that I could eat two Big Macs, a large fries, six chicken McNuggets and a chocolate milkshake in one sitting without feeling sick.”

  “Christ,” I said, “that’s disgusting.”

  He nodded his head in agreement. “That’s me, baby,” he laughed with his arms in the air.

  * * *

  Later, he arrived into the bedroom with a piece of paper and a pen.

  “John, I’m trying to get dressed here.”

  He put the pen and paper on the dressing-table. “Come on, it’s just a few tests. Ten minutes tops. I want to try it out before the party.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “You’re not planning on doing this at the party?” I asked incredulously.

  “Em, it’s a laugh,” he said unconvincingly.

  So I picked up the pen anyway, knowing I had no choice. “Make this quick. I have to blow-dry my hair,” I warned.

  He pulled out the instructions from his briefcase and started reading. “OK, pick a colour and write it down.”

  I thought for a second and wrote.

  “OK, name three things that you associate with that colour.”

  I thought for another few seconds and then wrote down three words.