‘What are you talking about?’ Chaquie’s face was scrunched up in disgust. ‘That Nixon chap is long gone. It’s years since he was…’

She paused. Barry the child was semaphoring her.

‘It’s a joke,’ he said. ‘You know, a joke? Ha. Ha. Look it up in the dictionary, you dozy wagon.’

‘Oh,’ said Chaquie, dazedly. ‘Nixon. What am I thinking of? But with Dermot coming this afternoon I’m not really myself…’

To everyone’s alarm she looked as if she was going to cry.

‘Relax the head, missus,’ said Barry, hastily moving away. ‘You’re not really a dozy wagon.’

The room held its collective breath for a few tense moments until Chaquie’s face brightened.

As soon as we had the all-clear I regaled everyone with great tales of being under the knife.

‘Root canals?’ I scoffed. ‘No bother.’

‘But didn’t it HURT?’ Don wanted to know.

‘Nothing to it,’ I boasted, electing to draw a veil over the scenario of me crying tears of agony while in the chair.

‘And weren’t you ascared?’ John Joe asked.

‘I couldn’t afford to be scared,’ I said primly. ‘It had to be done and that was that.’

Which was almost true, I realized in surprise.

‘How much did it cost?’ Eddie asked the question that mattered most to him.

‘God, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Not very much, I’m sure.’

Eddie laughed darkly. ‘What shower did you come down in? You must have been born yesterday. Those dentists and doctors won’t even give you the time of day without charging through the nose for it.’

‘Eddie,’ I decided to take a risk, ‘do you know something? You’re a bit neurotic about money.’

40

And so to group.

Down the hall we charged, Eddie shouting after me ‘Just because I know the value of money…!’

Dermot and his wig were already there. Now that I knew he had one, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was so obvious. And big enough to deserve a chair of its own.

Dermot had dressed up in honour of being Chaquie’s ISO. He wore a double-breasted suit that tried and failed to bring his enormous stomach to heel. From the side, he looked like a big letter ‘D’.

Chaquie was perfumed and immaculately made-up, even more than usual.

I was curious and sceptical about what Dermot would have to say for himself. I believed Chaquie when she said that all she drank was a Bacardi and coke now and then with the girls. Chaquie was not Neil, and I was sure she hadn’t deliberately misled me about the extent of her alcohol problem the way he had.

In fact, I suspected that Chaquie, irritating and all as she was with her in-your-face right-wing views, had led a fairly blameless life.

I was surprised to find my attitude had changed since I’d first met Chaquie. I now had a strange grudging fondness for her.

Josephine arrived and we all straightened up and calmed down.

She thanked Dermot for coming and said ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell us a bit about Chaquie’s drinking.’

Idly, I stuck my tongue into my tooth. I couldn’t stop doing that. I was extremely proud of myself and my root canal.

‘She was always fond of drink,’ Dermot said, having none of Emer’s reticence.

Chaquie looked dismayed.

‘She was always giving me guff about having to have whiskey for a cold or port and brandy for an upset stomach or…’

‘Can I help it if I’m often not well?’ Chaquie interrupted, her accent posher than ever.

Josephine glared and Chaquie subsided.

‘As I said,’ Dermot sighed, ‘she was always fond of it, but she hid how bad things were until she’d got the ring on her finger. And then she started making a show of me.’

Chaquie exclaimed. Josephine silenced her with a frown.

‘What kind of show?’

‘I work very hard,’ Dermot said. ‘Very hard. I’m a self-made man and I built the business up from nothing…’

‘And you did that all by yourself, did you?’ Chaquie interrupted, her voice unexpectedly shrill. ‘Well, you couldn’t have done it without me. It was my idea, getting the upright sunbeds.’

‘It was not!’ Dermot said irritably. ‘I read about them in a catalogue long before you ever saw them in that place in London.’

‘You didn’t! That’s a pure lie. You didn’t even know how they worked.’

‘I’m telling you,’ Dermot emphasized each word with a chop of his midgety hand, ‘I read about them.’

‘Perhaps we could come back to this,’ Josephine murmured. ‘We’re here to talk about Chaquie’s drink problem.’

‘We could be here all week in that case,’ Dermot said with a bitter snort.

‘Fair enough. Please carry on,’ Josephine invited. He needed no second bidding.

‘I didn’t know how bad it was for a long time because she was drinking on the sly,’ he said. ‘Hiding bottles and saying she had a migraine when she was really going to bed with a bottle of drink.’

Chaquie’s face was bright red.

‘And feeding me a pack of lies. I found about twenty empty bottles of Bacardi at the end of the garden and she said she knew nothing about it and blamed it on some lads from the corporation estate.

‘And we had the bank manager and his wife over for dinner one night. I was trying to get a loan off him to extend the premises and Chaquie starts singing, “Happy birthday, Mr President, coocoocachoo,” like she’s Marilyn Monroe, wiggling her backside and giving him a faceful of cleavage…’

I flicked a glance at Chaquie. Her face was a picture of horror. I felt a shameful mixture of pity and glee.

‘… she’d been drinking all afternoon. But when I asked her about it, she lied and said she was stone-cold sober. When a child could have seen she was drunk. Then she went out to the kitchen to serve the smoked salmon roulade and never came back. We waited for hours, and I was highly embarrassed and trying to keep the conversation going with Mr O’Higgins. And when I went looking for her, where did I find her, only in bed, out cold…’

‘I wasn’t well,’ Chaquie mumbled.

‘Needless to say,’ Dermot said with satisfaction, ‘I didn’t get the loan. After that her drinking got worse so that she was langers every night of the week and most of the days too. I couldn’t depend on her for anything.’