Wait a minute! Vultures?
In a city?
At a petrol station?
I took a second look and they weren’t vultures. Just seagulls. Ordinary Irish seagulls.
Then I thought: Ah no, not again.
Fifteen minutes later I pulled up outside my parents’ house, took a moment to gather myself, then started rummaging for a key to let myself in. They’d tried to make me give it back when I moved out three years ago but – thinking strategically – I’d hung on to it. Mum had made noises about changing the locks but seeing as she and Dad took eight years to decide to buy a yellow bucket, what were the chances that they’d manage something as complicated as getting a new lock?
I found them in the kitchen, sitting at the table drinking tea and eating cake. Old people. What a great life they had. Even those who don’t do t’ai chi. (Which I’ll get to.)
They looked up and stared at me with barely concealed resentment.
‘I’ve news,’ I said.
Mum found her voice. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I live here.’
‘You don’t. We got rid of you. We painted your room. We’ve never been happier.’
‘I said I’ve news. That’s my news. I live here.’
The fear was starting to creep into her face now. ‘You have your own place.’ She was blustering but she was losing conviction. After all, she must have been expecting this.
‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘Not as of this morning. I’ve nowhere to live.’
‘The mortgage people?’ She was ashen. (Beneath her regulation-issue Irish-Mammy orange foundation.)
‘What’s going on?’ Dad was deaf. Also frequently confused. It was hard to know which disability was in the driving seat at any particular time.
‘She didn’t pay her MORTGAGE,’ Mum said, into his good ear. ‘Her flat’s been RECLAIMED.’
‘I couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage. You’re making it sound like it’s my fault. Anyway, it’s more complicated than that.’
‘You have a boyfriend,’ Mum said hopefully. ‘Can’t you live with him?’
‘You’ve changed your tune, you rampant Catholic.’
‘We have to keep up with the times.’
I shook my head. ‘I can’t move in with Artie. His kids won’t let me.’ Not exactly. Only Bruno. He absolutely hated me but Iona was pleasant enough and Bella positively adored me. ‘You’re my parents. Unconditional love, might I remind you. My stuff is in the car.’
‘What! All of it?’
‘No.’ I’d spent the day with two cash-in-hand blokes. The last few sticks of furniture I owned were now stashed in a massive self-storage place out past the airport, waiting for the good times to come again. ‘Just my clothes and work stuff.’ Quite a lot of work stuff, actually, seeing as I’d had to let my office go over a year ago. And quite a lot of clothes too, even though I’d thrown out tons and tons while I’d been packing.
‘But when will it end?’ Mum said querulously. ‘When do we get our golden years?’
‘Never.’ Dad spoke with sudden confidence. ‘She’s part of a syndrome. Generation Boomerang. Adult children coming back to live in the family home. I read about it in Grazia.’
There was no disagreeing with Grazia.
‘You can stay for a few days,’ Mum conceded. ‘But be warned. We might want to sell this house and go on a Caribbean cruise.’
Property prices being as low as they were, the sale of this house probably wouldn’t fetch enough money to send them on a cruise of the Aran Islands. But, as I made my way out to the car to start lugging in my boxes of stuff, I decided not to rub it in. After all, they were giving me a roof over my head.
‘What time is dinner?’ I wasn’t hungry but I wanted to know the drill.
‘Dinner?’
There was no dinner.
‘We don’t really bother any more,’ Mum confessed. ‘Not now it’s just the two of us.’
This was distressing news. I was feeling bad enough, without my parents suddenly behaving like they were in death’s waiting room. ‘But what do you eat?’
They looked at each other in surprise, then at the cake on the table. ‘Well … cake, I suppose.’
Back in the day this arrangement couldn’t have suited me better – all through my childhood my four sisters and I considered it a high-risk activity to eat anything that Mum had cooked – but I wasn’t myself.
‘So what time is cake?’
‘Whatever time you like.’
That wouldn’t do. ‘I need a time.’
‘Seven, then.’
‘Okay. Listen … I saw a swarm of vultures over the petrol station.’
Mum tightened her lips.
‘There are no vultures in Ireland,’ Dad said. ‘Saint Patrick drove them out.’
‘He’s right,’ Mum said forcefully. ‘You didn’t see any vultures.’
‘But –’ I stopped. What was the point? I opened my mouth to suck in some air.
‘What are you doing?’ Mum sounded alarmed.
‘I’m …’ What was I doing? ‘I’m trying to breathe. My chest is stuck. There isn’t enough room to let the air in.’
‘Of course there’s room. Breathing is the most natural thing in the world.’
‘I think my ribs have shrunk. You know the way your bones shrink when you get old.’
‘You’re only thirty-three. Wait till you get to my age and then you’ll know all about shrunken bones.’
Even though I didn’t know what age Mum was – she lied about it constantly and elaborately, sometimes making reference to the vital part she played in the 1916 Rising (‘I helped type up the Declaration of Independence for young Padraig to read on the steps of the GPO’), other times waxing lyrical on the teenage years she spent jiving to ‘The Hucklebuck’ the time Elvis came to Ireland (Elvis never came to Ireland and never sang ‘The Hucklebuck’, but if you try telling her that, she just gets worse, insisting that Elvis made a secret visit on his way to Germany and that he sang ‘The Hucklebuck’ specifically because she asked him to) – she seemed bigger and more robust than ever.
‘Catch your breath there, come on, come on, anyone can do it,’ she urged. ‘A small child can do it. So what are you doing this evening? After your … cake? Will we watch telly? We’ve got twenty-nine episodes of Come Dine With Me recorded.’