Page 3 of Such a Good Couple
Ironically, Fionn and Maggie were the ones the others had worried about. Maggie lived from arts grant to arts grant, staging beautiful but extremely uncommercial site-specific theatre productions, and Fionn acted when he was cast and did restaurant work in between. They had moved to London to pursue the theatre life but they were still fairly broke.
At home in Ireland, Clara and Annie had pored over the ‘Maggie problem’. When was she going to get practical? When were they going to ‘get real’ and ‘settle down’? Surely once the twins (‘Twins! God luv them,’ Clara’d wailed on hearing) were born, they’d have to get proper jobs.
‘Right,’ the driver called to them from the front seat. ‘Which terminal are ye going to?’
‘Terminal 2, please,’ Clara replied, checking that all the boyswere wearing their seatbelts.
At that time, the ‘proper job’ Clara had was in customer service for Google. Meanwhile, Ollie was a gardener, which was perfect. He loved the freedom and creativity and had always had steady work because anyone who could afford to have a garden in Dublin never had time to garden because they worked all day and all night to be able to afford the gardens they were never home to be in.
All was reasonably fine, until afuckingpandemic meant everyone was at home for literal years. Gardening their little arses off all of a sudden.
Then Clara had been made redundant. To save face she’d told her friends that she’d made the decision to leave. Now she was eight months into her job at ComYOUnicate. It was a garden-variety call centre with a particularly cringe name. She was struggling with it –she felt like a snob but she hadn’t pictured herself at forty-two working in a call centre. Sure, in Google, for all those years, she had essentially been making calls. But there’d been a cachet in working for Google. In ComYOUnicate there were no splashy murals on the walls shouting moronic slogans. It was windowless, grey and functional. Aesthetically, compared with the fancy tech places, it was like working in the basement where a serial killer keeps his victims.
Clara gazed out the window as the taxi merged with the sluggish mid-afternoon traffic. In two weeks’ time, she’d be back in the office, a place so clogged with the fug of warm tuna sandwiches and instant coffee it was practically a microclimate all of its own.
Look, she reminded herself,only a handful of, let’s face it, insufferable people like their jobs; everyone else just gets on with it.
Now that the cost-of-living crisis had them by their necks, she and Ollie spent all their time tagging in and out of home life.Clara usually worked from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and when she got home, Ollie went out to put in as many hours as he could with the clients he had left before it got dark. They passed kids and laundry and school notes and homework back and forth between them all week. On the weekends, Ollie did full days at a garden centre an hour’s drive from Crumlin, where they lived, and Clara spent her days ‘off’ attempting to clean the ever-rising tide of shite in their house. And screaming lovingly at the kids – never not screaming at the kids.
The really hard part about the days and overtime hours she spent tethered to the headset was that they didn’t buy her any ease in her home life. Working at full tilt still only meant that they were just about keeping up. Clara tried to relax her jaw as the taxi swung off the motorway and passed under a sign for the airport. The cause of the hovering sadness she had felt but not quite articulated in the previous weeks suddenly pulled into focus: without Maggie and Fionn, her boys would not be going on a plane right now. There’d be no holiday. It was a very hard thing to not be able to give your children the things they deserved.
Back in March, when they were all nailing down the dates for the Provincetown holiday, she and Ollie had joked about selling their spot on the trip on DoneDeal.
Clara hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell Annie and Maggie about how much they were struggling. It was hard not being able to vent about it to the two people she was closest to in the whole world but, for very different reasons, Annie and Maggie were not the best audience for the Wrung-Out Parent Lament.
From the floor of the taxi, Clara pulled up her shoulder bag (Mulberry from Maggie; Annie had one too) and did another check that she had all five passports. She glanced over at Ollie, who was playing (and winning) rock-paper-scissors against Tomwhile also furiously thumbing his phone.
‘You haven’t even askedonceabout the passports,’ she said pointedly, pursing her lips. ‘What if I’d assumedyouwere sorting them?’
‘Hmmmm?’ Ollie was a good multitasker but adding a pass-agg married-couple thought experiment to his current roster of activities was too much even for him.
‘The passports, babe,’ she said loudly. ‘I only have mine and the boys’, did you bring yours?’
That got his attention. He blanched, then grinned. ‘Hahaha, shut up. You’re evil.’ He resumed texting.
‘I always vowed not to be one of those straight couples where the man is some honorary child the wife looks after and steers through life.’
‘Honorary child? I wish,’ he muttered. He looked up from his phone. ‘Do you even know when the car’s up for its next NCT? Or who our health insurance provider is? You’re not exactly a paragon of maturity!’
Did she detect a slightly sneering edge to his words? They’d been best friends for two decades but ten years of child-related broken sleep had definitely seen some snippiness creeping in here and there. Was it more lately? It was hard to tell.
‘Also,’ Ollie continued, ‘spending the child benefit allowance in the pub after you’ve gone “for one” with your twenty-five-year-old workmates makesmefeel like I’ve got an unruly teenager.’
Clara debated throwing something back at him:At least you get to do a job you actually like?came to mind.
But playing the Married Couple Hardship Olympics right before a holiday wasn’t worth it. They needed this break very badly so she settled on: ‘That was one time, Ollie!’ She kept her tone playful. ‘And it wasn’t thewholepayment. A few euro on blowing off steam! My job is hard – it’s very draining workingwith young people who’re happy and full of optimism about life. The sheer effort it takes to not punch them in the face.’
‘Why did you go out with them, then? Do they need to be burped after their pints?’
Clara grinned. This felt better, this was more them. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘parenting is very stressful. If the government doesn’t want us to spend the child benefit on self-medicating, they should provide better state-funded childcare.’
This raised a bit of a laugh from him at least, though a second later he’d already slid back onto his phone.
She frowned. The phone obsession was just a fact of twenty-first-century married life, wasn’t it? Maybe it was even prolonging millennial marriages? Less pressure to continue being entertaining for each other for years on end. You could just keep a steady stream of memes and TikToks going back and forth and, voila, you had a reasonably good approximation of a fun relationship.
Clara wished that she could see his screen, though. She also wished that she didn’t wish this but she couldn’t help it. He was on it so much. Everyone was on their phones a lot, of course, but recently Ollie couldn’t seem to leave it down for a second. Was it something nefarious? Unlikely.
Though the truth was Olliehadbeen acting strangely in the last few months. She’d been on a committed jag of explaining it away but the unease was growing like a tumour. Along with being glued to the phone, he was regularly coming home from work much later than usual, often after dark, with shrugging explanations about tweaking irrigation systems and whatnot. She knew there were some jobs gardeners could do at night but she couldn’t imagine his wealthy clients wanting him skulking around their properties at that hour. Then he’d always hop straight into the shower when he came home even though it was late and could wake the kids. Sometimes, in her sleep-addledstate, she even sensed him gone from the bed during the night but he’d always be back snoring beside her in the morning. Most unnerving of all, she was noticing that the money coming in from his Saturday hours in the garden centre seemed less than usual.
