Best Love, Rosie. Nuala O'Faolain

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СКАЧАТЬ threw the window open so that the room filled with a mad cacophony of hooting and pealing, and Min got ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on her radio and the two of us sang along and Bell began the New Year by stalking out the bedroom door in outrage.

      From: [email protected]

      To: [email protected]

      Sent: 11.25 a.m.

      Dear Markey,

      I got this address from your Christmas card from Seattle – I hope you don’t mind me using it. I’m contacting you from – guess where? Right. Same old house. I came back because Min had become very reclusive and she was drinking (but only a little bit at the moment, fingers crossed).

      Do you remember Colfer’s shop? Mr Colfer who took about half an hour to serve a person anything? Well Peg, his youngest, who’s a friend of mine and has been going out for ever with Reeny’s son Monty (do you remember Reeny? She was very friendly with your mam though she isn’t a bit religious) – anyhow, Peg gave me two books for Christmas – one by a priest I once went on a protest march with, and one by an American woman who used to be married to Seán Bán Breathnach who used to do the commentary on football matches in Irish. Books written to help you through life.

      Peg told me that both those writers are now millionaires, and that it’s because people think they’re Irish – well not exactly Irish but Celtic. (It seems people think the Irish fall out of bars and thump each other, whereas the Celts have more class).

      The question I want to ask you, Markey, is: Could I not write a book that would give advice to people about how to get through life?

      I am as Celtic as the next person. And I am an experienced writer – I attach my CV and you will see that over the years, in a variety of jobs, I have written every kind of promotional and educational and informational material. And I BADLY WANT work that I can do at home, where I can keep an eye on Min because sometimes I think she’s very depressed.

      I realise that Rare Medical Books is a book business, not a publisher, but you must know people in the American publishing world? Would it be possible for you to put me in touch with an agent who specialises in this kind of thing? I know this is a long shot but frankly, Markey, from what I’ve seen, a baby could do better than most of the people who write these books. Their strong point seems to be their perky, optimistic tone, but I believe I could imitate that.

      To give you an example:

       Rosie Barry’s Four-F Programme for the Middle Part of the Journey!

      Are you as rich in experience as you are still young at heart?

      And do you sometimes feel that neither the challenges nor the rewards of these vibrant years the world calls middle age have had the attention they deserve?

      The Four-F programme builds on your wisdom, your joy and the love for others that a life well-lived has taught you. Don’t let the years take you where you don’t want to go. Instead:

      Frolic like you always did!

      Fear nothing!

      Make every day a Fiesta.

      And don’t forget, but Forgive!

      Thank you in advance, Markey, for any help you can give. Don’t forget that if anyone in the self-help world would like to meet me to discuss this or any other idea, I can easily go to New York.

      I haven’t written to you since I sent you a card from Warsaw about Chopin a very long time ago, but I have thought about you and talked to you in my head many, many times.

      Rosie Barry

      2

      ‘Markey, what time is it in Seattle? Your message said I could call any time. Are you busy? Can you listen for a minute?’

      ‘Rosie, what’s wrong with your voice?’

      ‘Min is supposed to be asleep but she might come down. She thinks long distance is going to land us in the poorhouse, even when it’s an incoming call. When Reeny rings from Spain, Min holds the receiver away from her ear as if electricity is leaking out of it and shouts, “All here are well thank God” and she tries to hang up. But anyway, Markey, have you any news yet?’

      ‘One agent said she’d get back to me and I’ll follow up again today.’

      ‘OK. Thanks,’ I whispered. ‘Keep in touch.’

      Singing was coming from the bathroom. Oh, yes, Saturday. I’d begun to insist at the end of February that Min get up on Saturdays. I said the bed had to be aired. She obeyed because I took her out to breakfast.

      She was singing “Là ci darem la mano’ in her own home-made Esperanto. God alone knew what she thought that song was about, or any of the songs in Italian or French or, come to that, English that she made word-like noises to.

      I sent her back upstairs to fetch her woolly hat and we went out into a wind that slapped us.

      ‘O know you the land where the lemon trees bloom?’ I said while we waited, shivering, to cross the main road. ‘Italy,’ I clarified.

      ‘Well, away with you to Italy,’ Min said. ‘What’s stopping you?’

      I didn’t bother answering that.

      The man in the newsagent’s in the shopping centre flirts with every woman who comes in. He tried with Min even though she didn’t just look sixty-nine – she looked sixty-nine and quite odd. But she took no notice; said, ‘Yes, yes!’ impatiently and found the newspaper for me as quickly as possible, because she knew that if I had something to read I’d stay in the coffee-shop longer. I glanced at the news while she sat beside me surveying the scene, nodding, smiling and frowning at this or that like a kindly potentate. I knew what she was doing. When I was with her in public my nerves grew taut. I had to fend off the thought that someone looking at the two of us might think she was my mother and believe they could see in her what I would become.

      Then I had to fend off the thought that no one ever did look at us.

      Then I had to admit to myself shamefacedly that by ‘no one’ I meant no man. Kilbride just didn’t have the kind of men who’d look with interest at a pair of women like myself and my aunt. Where, indeed, did? I was a proud feminist when I was young and I stirred up interest everywhere I went. But I never gave a thought then to what the passing of time might do to my self-sufficiency. It was only recently, after the affair with Leo cooled down, that I saw how I’d fallen out of a world that had men looking for women, and into a world that had mostly women in it, and gay men, and men very satisfied with their marriages. That world my boss in Luxembourg, a very bitter woman, told me about on my first day after I’d been posted there for a while by the Information Unit: of how demographically there were nine single women to every single man in that little country.

      ‘And they’re young women, mostly,’ she’d said, looking at me.

      The café was peaceful. An old lady on Min’s left was making smiling faces at the infant sprawled in a buggy in front of a young woman who was chatting away to another young woman facing another buggy, who never took her eyes off her own calm baby. Both girls wore jeans and high heels and looked as comfortable in their roles as if they’d been practising them for a thousand СКАЧАТЬ