And what if one of these therapists fell on hard times? Well, they’d be straight down to the nearest ‘red top’, looking for a fine big handful of money in exchange for secrets.
I would never go to one of those people. Even if I had any ‘issues’. Which I haven’t. Issues! It’s a load of codology and you could buy a new skirt every week with the money they charge you.
In this kind of ‘work’ they make a big thing about getting ‘closure’. Everyone has to get ‘closure’ on everything these days. If you drop a cup, you have to get closure on it. If you miss the bus, you have to get closure. If you open a drawer, you have to get closure (that was my little joke there).
In my day, there was no such thing as closure. If something ‘bad’ happened to you, say like a man ‘exposing himself’ to you on the bus, and you went a bit funny in the head and started running round the house in the middle of the night, screeching and yelling that you couldn’t take it any more, Father Cormac would be brought in to pray over you and that would be the end of that.
It wouldn’t make any difference, of course. The middle-of-the-night running and screeching and yelling would carry on, but no one would pay any heed. Closure, my eye!
X is for Xylophone. Although I don’t play it and neither does anyone in the family. In fact, I’m proud to say we’re an entirely unmusical bunch. Would there be anything more tiresome than being a musical family? Shur, you’d never get any visitors!
‘Oh no,’ people would think, ‘I’m not calling in to see that crowd. You’re barely in the door before they’ve their melodeons out and they’re banging the spoons agin their thighs and batting their feet off the wooden floor, and you’re expected to join in and do a recitation of your own or something. No, we’ll give them a steer. We’ll visit the Cullens instead; they’ve a bouncy castle.’
The Walshes are no good at anything, to be perfectly honest with you. We’re not sporty. (Margaret was good at camogie about a thousand years ago, but she let it slide.) We’re hopeless at charades. We’ve no talent for the am-dram (apart from the time Mr Walsh had a small part in the Blackrock Players’ production of Oklahoma! and he had us all driven mad with his ‘method’ acting. He ate nothing but beans for ten days and he spoke Oklahoma-ese – ‘y’all’ this and ‘y’all’ that and when he thought something looked nice he said it was ‘mad purt’. Up the wall, he had us driven, up the effing wall.)
But I can’t think of anything else for the letter X … No, hold on! I spoke too soon …
X is for X-rays. There was this time that Anna broke her finger. (How? I hear you ask. In a skiing accident? Falling off a bus in a state of ‘scutteredness’? And the answer is: No. She broke her finger while she was rooting round in her wardrobe looking for her blue shoes.)
I ask you! What sort of story is that? I told her to ‘embellish’ it, so now she says something about catching it in a revolving door.
Off she goes to the hospital and her broken finger is x-rayed from two different angles and it’s found that it is indeed broken, so they put it in a splint and send her home. But they also give her her x-rays – do not ask me why! And she was thrilled with them. She kept holding them up and admiring them and bringing them close to her face, then zooming them out as far as her arm would go.
The next thing you know, her fella gets them framed and mounted on the wall, with their own personal uplighters, like they’re the Mona Lisa. So when people come into her pretty little apartment you can see them looking around admiringly and nodding at the pot plants and cushions, and then they see the two x-rays hanging on the wall and you watch them do a double take and look again and you can see them thinking, ‘What in the name of all that’s sacred are those two things? Art, is it? Is it art I’m looking at? Because what else could it be?’
Y is for Yoghurt. Specifically Plain Yoghurt at Room Temperature. Margaret and her sisters were playing a game in which they were saying what each of them would be if they were food. Claire would be a green curry because she’s fiery; Rachel would be a jelly baby, not because she’s sweet but because Helen likes to bite her head off; Anna, if I remember right, was a selection of nuts; Helen was a durian fruit because she’s so offensive she’s banned in several countries. And poor Margaret was Plain Yoghurt at Room Temperature – the most boring food they could think of.
But they’re wrong about her. There’s a lot more to Margaret than meets the eye. Yes, she lives within her means! Why is that a crime? Yes, she might have a savings account! Again, why the scorn? She simply doesn’t have the ‘diva gene’ that Claire, Rachel and Helen have. When things go wrong for them, they stomp around and shout and sometimes throw something (usually one of my good ornaments) at the wall. Whereas when things went wrong for Margaret – and for a while there they went terribly wrong – she curled in on herself and, if you weren’t paying attention, you mightn’t have noticed at all that something was up.
In her defence, she can be neurotic. She has a disorder – she suffers from shopping bulimia. She buys clothes, then agonizes about them and wonders whether she should take them back, and then sometimes she does and she has to fill out a form giving her reason and has to say things like ‘Makes my knees look funny’, and that goes to Head Office.
I will admit that, for a good long while, we didn’t like Margaret’s husband, Garv, because the first time we met him we thought he didn’t stand his round, and as everyone in Ireland knows, not standing your round is the worst thing a man could do. You’d get a more sympathetic audience if you murdered someone. Margaret insists that Garv tried, but that everyone shouted at him and yelled right into his face that they were getting it, that he was insulting them by even suggesting it. Garv even went as far as the bar, where Mr Walsh was trying to get the barman’s attention, but Mr Walsh shoved him away.
Of course the correct protocol is that Garv should shove Mr Walsh back and perhaps tuck Mr Walsh’s head under his oxter while yelling at the barman that he was paying for this one. But Garv didn’t do that. Margaret said he wouldn’t have felt right laying his hands on his prospective father-in-law. He just didn’t know the rules, that was all.
But it played out badly for him. For a long time, rumours circulated that he was so mean he’d peel an orange in his pocket. Anyway, that’s all in the past and we’re fond of him now!