Fly in the Ointment Read Free

‘You simply can’t expect a bloke to understand that sort of thing.’
    So that’s what I did. I look back now and I’m astonished at the effort I must have put in over the years to tell myself things weren’t that bad. I clutched at hints of unhappiness in other marriages. I relished the company of women whose husbands’ failings seemed far worse than Stuart’s. I think if I’d lived on a street of wife-beaters, gamblers and drunks, I would have spent my whole life pushing Malachy’s stroller back and forth past all their garden gates, flattering myself that I’d made an excellent choice (or maybe, in less robust moments, assuring myself that, if I had not drawn my particular marital short straw, I wouldhave drawn some other). I was a far cry from the woman I’d have been if I had had the sense to listen to my father, or, like so many others, put off the wedding long enough to see whether, in time, attraction soured into disgust and pity into irritation.
    Or grave good looks into the constant absence of a smile. For Stuart turned out to be grumpy. Not even the nice sort of grumpy, as when a man sinks comfortably into the depths of the sofa and grouses amiably about the perfidy of the government or the shortness of his daughters’ skirts. No. Mean-spirited grumpy. Over the years Stuart must have got round to criticizing every single thing about me: my parenting skills, my dress sense, my cooking – even my spelling. He was the sort of person you’d move away from at a party, and I was so stupid and green that all I ever did was try even harder to please him.
    Well, more fool me. The only way to get through to people like Stuart is to bring a frying pan down on their heads, along with a sharp command to ‘Stop that now!’ I just went quiet and thought I was doing the right thing by staying. (‘A baby needs his father.’) Once there’s a child, of course, few women have the energy to deal with larger problems. And so our deadly marriage dragged on for years. Most people know the score: those days of letting the words you think of saying to break the silence echo in test runsthrough your brain before you decide not to bother; those nights of sleeping poorly for fear of letting an unguarded leg cross the cool gap between the two of you and be mistaken for a gesture of remorse. Gradually you find that the life you’d hoped to share has been divided into ‘spheres of influence’. Separate development, really. People are right. If you’re afraid of loneliness, then don’t for heaven’s sake make the mistake of getting married.
    But Malachy was a joy. There’s something so
hopeful
about babies, toddlers, small children. A whole new life just waiting to be unzipped. He was the happiest of boys through all his primary schooling. I blame that secondary school for what went wrong. How do these teachers manage to close their eyes to all that bullying? The wrong sort of clothes, or family, or face? Disaster! The wrong sort of personality? Tough luck on you. You’ll simply have to put up with a heap of vicious shoving and hitting all the way to school in the morning, through every break-time, and all the way home at night. Small wonder so many schoolchildren bunk off, turn inwards or take to comforts like drugs. I think my Malachy had less strength of will than most. (I’d hate to think that he was under even more pressure.) And I didn’t have the sense to march up to the school and take him out of there, giving those teachers a taste of the truth: ‘Whyshould I leave my son with you? He’s neither safe nor happy, and what little you teach him is not worth the misery of staying all day to learn it. Forget the whole deal.’
    So, for whatever reason – and this is my bitterest regret – I didn’t do it. And by fifteen my son was probably a hopeless case. A terrible thing to say. Fifteen? Lost cause? Of