The Last Days of Joy

by Anne Tiernan

Genres: General Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A family brought together by the person they said goodbye to long ago...

MEET THE TOBIN FAMILY...

Joy, the complicated, troubled mother
She's spent her life running from her past while trying to raise her children as best she can.

Conor, the high-achieving eldest child
A high-profile media figure and CEO, he's walking a fine line between self-promotion and self-detonation.

Frances, the 'perfect' middle child
Now a wife and mother, she's about to make a mistake that could destroy her marriage.

Youngest daughter, Sinead, the acclaimed writer
Wrestling with writer's block, she resorts to desperate measures to deliver her next bestselling book to her publishers.

When Joy's children receive the news that she has only days to live, they rush to her side, bringing with them all of the dysfunction and hurt they have been carrying since their childhoods. Each of them is at a crossroads in their lives - but there's one more secret about their mother they need to learn. Will they finally be able to forgive their mother and, in doing so, face their futures together?

(P) 2023 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Publisher: Hachette New Zealand

Print pages: 400

Sample

In the end it was the birds.

When I woke, I had a moment of forgetting, the sweet unknowing between my dreams and consciousness where I could be anyone. But reality – my own self – lurked just beyond awareness. Like something sinister scratching at the edges, demanding to be admitted, until the revelation, Yes, there you are, Joy. The same person as yesterday.

And today, the birds punctured the oblivion with such optimism, I knew I’d had enough. They sounded so welcoming of another day and I begrudged them this. What’s worse, even after thirty years here I couldn’t tell you the names of the birds I hear. Daddy would be disappointed. Daddy with his love for nature detailed in the battered green notebook that held all the secrets of the universe. They know enough who know how to learn, Joy, he used to say. Well, I’m sorry Daddy, somewhere along the way I’ve grown incurious. I am every dead thing.

I know well though the call of the cooing wood pigeon, that soundtrack of hazy Irish summer mornings as a girl. There was a melancholic edge to its song and a stillness to the mornings then. Soft day, thank God. The New Zealand light is brash; it intensifies beauty, but it also highlights darkness. It struck me then, in a removed kind of a way, that I would never again hear the wood pigeon. Or see a crow. There’s a creature I never thought I’d miss. Not until about a year after I’d moved here and noticed its absence. I could live in this place for another thirty years and still be making comparisons. It’s the diaspora’s lot: a foot in each place forever. Of two homes, and yet none. I worry I’ve caused that dichotomy in the children too, uprooting them so young. Motherhood is all second guessing and guilt.

Now, almost midnight, sitting at the kitchen table, I feel a grainy wetness across my hand. Donne. He looks up at me, exposing his grey muzzle and eyes milky with cataracts and it occurs to me, for all the planning of the last few weeks, I haven’t thought this through. Donne, like all his breed, is a slave to his appetite and the temptation of a meal might be too hard for him to resist. I imagine the lurid tabloid story: ‘Granny Eaten by Own Labrador!’ I find this macabre headline almost funny, though I’m not sure if I can trust my emotions. So, although he won’t like it, I lead him outside to his kennel and tie him up.

‘There you go, old fella, I’m doing you a favour. You’ll make a more appealing pet this way.’ I cuddle his bearish head and hear a little whimper. I don’t know if it’s coming from him or me.

Going inside again, I check the note I taped on the back door for Frances, who comes every Saturday morning like clockwork. Such a good girl. She’s been my rock, but I never deserved her. Or any of them.

Franny, please, please don’t come in. It’ll be an awful mess and we all know how much you hate a mess! Just call 111 and ask for the police. I hope you all understand. I have felt only between lives forever anyway. Love Mum x

It is brief, but as I wrote it I realised there was too much to say and no earthly way of saying it. I hope what I’m about to do will convey an apology, a willingness to do penance.

I sit at the table and pick up the gun. I have taken it from its hiding place, my little train case under the bed, and handled it like this every day since it arrived. Holding it has given me unexpected comfort. I never imagined I would hold a gun, let alone enjoy doing so, but there you go, life has the capacity to surprise to the end. I’ve come to think of it less as a weapon and more as a switch, capable of turning off the pain. Quick and certain.

It is a beauty though, with its silver barrel and lacquered brown handle, like something you’d see in an old western. Even the name of it is like something from the Wild West, SMITH & WESSON engraved on the side. I think Daddy, for all his gentleness, would have appreciated it. I lift it to my face, inhale the resiny odour and am immediately transported to a well-worn memory. The two of us in the old cinema in Rathmines, watching a John Wayne film, The Searchers, with that lovely Natalie Wood. I was a slip of a thing and mainly interested in the paper bag of lemon bonbons and bullseyes on my lap. A whole quarter to myself! My arid 67-year-old mouth fizzes at the thought of them. I’m not sure if I was ever a happy child but the memory of watching that film is wrapped in a feeling as close to happiness as I can imagine. I think of Livvy, and hope she’ll carry a warm memory or two of watching films with her gran. That’s as much as you can wish for after you’re gone; that you’re a fond fleeting thought for someone every now and then.

I think it will be okay to pour myself a small vodka from the bottle perched on the sideboard; just enough to calm the shake in my hand but not enough that there is any doubt or gossip. Not like that time … the little boy … I take six bullets from the box stashed in the drawer and load the gun just as I have practised over the last few days. I watched YouTube videos to learn how to do it. You can learn anything from the internet these days. The children might be a bit impressed by that.

Careful to keep the gun pointed away from me and my finger off the trigger, I move over to the kitchen chair that I have placed away from the walls and on top of the old groundsheet Conor left behind after he painted the sitting room. How I loved having him all to myself then. I never told him that though. I’d make excuses to skulk around the room, taking in the wonder of him, his broad shoulders and back hunched over as he coated the skirting, his dark hair curling on his tanned neck. And me like a harpy, asking him how much longer he’d be, mithering him to get a move on as I needed the room back, when the truth was I could have watched him forever. I just wanted to be near him but didn’t know how to do it in any way that felt natural. I envy the easy, generous way other mothers love. Mine always seems to express itself wrongly, as though it gets lost in translation, tainted on the way out by faulty wiring. I often think the worst part of me is motherhood.

Enough. I place the gun to my head and close my eyes, and even now that damned day comes unbidden again. Always, always. Like a film I’ve watched dozens of times and can’t turn off, the scenes play out with a grim reliability. First, the before moments, abscessed on my brain, winding me with their clarity. I am driving my blue Hillman Hunter to pick Conor and Frances up from school because it’s raining, and little Frances hates getting wet. Sinead is a toddler sitting in the back. I am singing to Sinead. Dance for your daddy my little lassie. She is clapping and laughing. Such a delightful baby! She loves the bit about the fishy on the dishy and lisps along.

Go back, Joy, go back, they’ll be grand, doesn’t Franny love to walk home with her big brother? He minds her, always has her hand. Sure a drop of rain never killed anyone.

But the scene plays on. And we are turning into the road leading to the school. And all roads lead here, to this moment. No, a drop of rain never killed anyone. But I did.

Enough now.

Frances is having a moment, a familiar one. That split second when she realises, with a grim acceptance, that she is about to be involved in something unpleasant. In these moments time has a way of expanding, making it possible to have several conflicting thoughts running concurrently. It had happened often as a child turning in to the cul-de-sac where she lived, holding her breath, squeezing her eyes shut then opening them as she exhaled forcefully and noted the clues the exterior of their little weatherboard house gave her as to their mother’s condition that day.

The catalyst for this particular moment is waking to the sound of her phone ringing sometime in the wee hours of a Saturday morning in early February. A moment between seeing the caller ID and ending the ‘Ave Satani’ ringtone (the theme tune from The Omen – Harry’s little joke) by choosing Accept. Her thoughts encompass every emotion from I must change that stupid ringtone to Would it really be so awful if she did die?

Compounding her inner tumult is a gnawing sense of shame at what precisely the ringing has woken her up from. She has been reluctantly ejected from an erotic dream involving Andy, an old boyfriend with whom she has recently reconnected on Facebook. The dream was so graphic. Almost disturbing in its lucidity. She hadn’t even realised that she knew such degradations existed. It’s as though her subconscious has its own Pornhub subscription. Dreams involving inappropriate sex with inappropriate partners have become more frequent. This is odd, given her libido has never been so low.

This is the punishment, she thinks. And wonders, given her very secular upbringing, if Catholic guilt is held in some kind of recessive gene.

‘What’s up, Mum?’

She says it quietly, though she need not worry about waking Harry. Years of feigning sleep through their daughter’s frequent night waking has meant that he has acquired an almost supernatural ability to slumber through any manner of things – earthquakes, tsunami sirens, loudly mating cats, crazy mothers. Livvy is now fourteen so the night waking has long since ceased to be an issue, but Harry’s superpower continues. It infuriates and amazes Frances in equal measure. Glancing at his slack, pillow-distorted features, she wonders why children are more beautiful when they sleep and adults uglier, and thinks maybe she doesn’t feel too guilty about her dream after all.

In any event, a midnight phone call is not such an unusual occurrence as to require any special attention from Harry. He had also slept through a fifteen-minute vodka-laden call two weeks ago, the purpose of which Frances couldn’t fathom and during which Joy had threatened (amongst other things) to leave Frances’s inheritance to a charity for exploited Sherpas, and, inexplicably, to tell Harry about some minor teenage transgression from almost thirty years prior. When this failed to move her elder daughter, she switched to a different strategy of proclaiming regret at being a terrible parent. Flashes of drunken self-awareness with promises of therapy and AA meetings. Then the tears. The self-pity was always the hardest to stomach. It was Frances’s cue to end the call.

‘Please tell me what I’ve done to deserve such coldness, Franny?’ Joy had wept. Frances imagined her in some kind of hokey melodrama from the 1950s, a black-and-white with Bette Davis or Joan Crawford.

‘Frankly, we’d be here till next week. Good night, Mother.’ And she lay awake for hours, furious at the world. Particularly at her mother, who, she speculated, would fall immediately into a deep sleep and not make mention of the call again, either because it was lost in the vodka-soaked recesses of her mind or because of her enormous capacity for self-denial. Frances couldn’t decide which was worse. When she’d complained, bleary-eyed, the next morning, Harry suggested turning her phone off at night. Frances protested that she needed it as an alarm clock. Harry suggested getting an old-fashioned radio alarm. Frances sighed and wished Harry would just commiserate with her on her dreadful luck in parentage rather than try to fix the immediate and much more trivial issue.

Now there is a nervous clearing of throat on the other end.

‘No, Frances dear, it’s Sue Preston. I’ve got some terrible news … Have you got someone there with you?’

Harry makes a snuffling sound, then shifts position but continues to sleep blissfully.

Frances looks at him darkly. ‘Sort of.’

She tries hard to follow the convoluted narrative, but between Sue’s discomfort at being the bearer of bad news and her own confusion at hearing her mother’s elderly neighbour in the middle of the night, much is lost. But the general gist involves Sue’s insomnia (‘a terrible affliction of old age’), her mother’s distressed dog (‘Joy would never let Donne suffer’), an inappropriately lit-up house (‘Power bills are exorbitant these days, you know’), a gunshot (‘an unmistakeable sound’), and a spare key under a planter (‘Rocket, lock it. That’s how I remember’).

The denouement is the discovery of Joy on the kitchen floor with a large wound to her head (‘but alive dear, somehow alive’).

It seems Sue’s instincts as a former nurse had kicked in and her quick ministrations to Joy kept her alive till the ambulance arrived. This has just departed, and Sue is still in the house waiting for the police to arrive. She thought it better to ring Frances herself rather than have them break the news. ‘You’re first on her list by the phone, you know!’ Said as though this is something Frances should take comfort from.

After hanging up, Frances sits in bed, surprised by the involuntary eruption of shaking over her entire body. So, this is it. She’s really done it. Well, almost. Frances realises that shocked as she is, there’s a kind of inevitability to this moment. It’s as though she’s been waiting for it her whole life.

She knows there is much to do. Husband to wake, siblings to corral, arrangements to be made. But for now she feels incapable of any of it.

Jet lag always gives Conor a seedy feeling, akin to a hangover. He doesn’t drink enough to ever be hungover, so he thinks that maybe it’s his body compensating, finding another method to flagellate. It seems to him that much of the ageing process involves novel ways for his physiology to betray him. He thinks he might easily descend into some nihilistic pit were it not for the partially sheet-covered figure beside him.

Lara. Everything about her soothes him. Her looks: tonal, almost monochromatic, with her brown hair, tanned skin and ochre eyes. And her easy temperament. Open, inquisitive, yielding. Conor has a vague feeling that admiring this in a woman borders on misogyny. Certainly, his mother and sisters would deride him for it. Lord knows he grew up surrounded by bolshie women. But Jesus, Lara is just happy. The jaded indifference that afflicts so many of his friends is absent. Maybe it’s her youth. Or simply that she didn’t grow up in an environment where you were always expecting bad things to happen.

He picks up his phone. Already a slew of new emails needing attention in the few hours since arriving back in Auckland from London. Two voice messages from Frances. His sister is the only person he knows who still leaves them. Who has the time to listen? Even his mother sends texts. But Franny hates communicating via any method that allows for ambiguity. And even when she does send a text, it is laborious, in grammatically perfect long hand. He will call her later.

Right now, he needs to capitalise on a meeting with a billionaire Kiwi expat whom he is sure is close to signing up. Conor is proud of his baby. He founded his not-for-profit TheOneForAll – a sort of one-stop shop for donating money – five years ago, at just the right moment. He had sensed a shift in zeitgeist. The affluent feeling that had to give back or at least be seen to be giving back. How else could they justify their wealth when so many had so little? Every self-respecting billionaire has a side hustle in philanthropy these days. Charity is big business. And young people no longer blindly hero-worship sportspeople, musicians or, God help us, influencers, unless they are philanthropic sportspeople, musicians or, God help us, influencers.

He’s witnessed a kind of puritanism developing amongst today’s youth. Now it’s all about the environment, the poor, the sick, the disenfranchised. The latest endangered species (but only if it is a photogenic one). Baby Boomers were happy for their rock idols to be a bit badass and their film stars to be impossibly aloof and glamorous. Gen X would have admired their favourite stars for merely highlighting social injustice. Or releasing a single or organising a concert for famine victims. However, Conor has recognised that this new generation needs them to put their money where their mouths are. Everyone needs to have a cause. Everyone needs to get political – especially when making an acceptance speech for yet another incestuous and vacuous showbiz award. And if you can’t live up to the high moral standards expected, then expect to be cancelled.

Convincing the rich to donate 1 per cent of their earnings – gross or net, Conor isn’t too pedantic; there could be tax benefits for both depending on the jurisdiction – to deserving charities is getting easier. Donors don’t have to think for themselves about who to donate to but still feel the smug glow of beneficence. These days, giving has become confusing. There are far too many charities, often with overlapping mission statements, not to mention all the Give-a-Little and GoFundMe causes. TheOneForAll simplifies things for a generation with too many choices.

And on a personal level, his abandonment of an unfulfilling fifteen-year corporate law career in favour of philanthropy has been revelatory. He was born for this. He only entered Law in the first place because that’s what you did back in the nineties if you were academically gifted and didn’t want to be a doctor. Sometimes it seems to Conor that his talents are better suited to a generation later than his own. A generation that doesn’t feel bound to formal qualifications and lifelong careers. A generation that values innovation and creative thinking over a steady pensionable job with statutory sick leave. Where good looks and a witty and canny handle on social media can earn you more than years of study. Law, with its strict adherence to exactness, had been strangulating. And at first the world of philanthropy set him free. But lately he’s felt a shift, as though it’s not quite enough anymore. A nagging feeling that a glittering career, no matter in what industry, can’t fill him up the way it once did. Maybe it’s why the sleeping figure in the bed beside him has come to mean so much.

Now, he must choose a photo to upload that will appeal to the charity’s many followers and the ego of his ex-pat billionaire, Cam. He has already received his permission to acknowledge the meeting. Such is TheOneForAll’s reach, even a hint of an association with it has the power to increase interest in a company or a person. And if donating to a charity generates more exposure and thus more revenue, it’s a win-win for everyone involved. Donating money is just another form of self-promotion.

He decides on a shot taken by his PA of the two of them sitting on a bench in Hyde Park, wrapped up in puffer jackets and beanies against the London winter. There is a clearly visible brown paper bag to the side, carrying the logo of one of Cam’s sustainable, organic, zero-waste and completely recyclable food outlets. Leaning against the back of the bench are a couple of Santander Cycles. The two men look deep in conversation and oblivious to the camera. They are leaning forward with their upper torsos turned towards each other, faces close. Conor’s hand is resting on Cam’s shoulder. He thinks for a moment and then captions it. How we do business lunch.

Now for the heart wrencher. He uploads another shot, taken by an intern, at the specialist children’s hospital in Auckland they donate funds to. It’s of a little girl, bald, sitting in a hospital bed, holding her Beads of Courage necklace in one hand and giving a thumbs up to the camera with the other. Nothing can trump a sick child for generating compassion. And likes. He captions the photo Aroha (Love), from Katie.

There is a loud yawn from the bed.

‘What god-awful hour is it?’

‘Hey babe, five a.m., sorry if I woke you.’

‘Shit, do you ever sleep?’ Lara moves to the end of the bed to sit beside him. ‘What are you doing?’ She burrows in against his shoulder.

He shows her what he has uploaded.

‘Nice. The first one will appeal to your gay hipster donors. Throw a kitten in and you’ll have nailed your basic bitch base too.’

‘Basic bitch?’

‘You know the type. Likes scented candles and Starbucks frappuccinos. Has inspirational art around the house proclaiming Live! Laugh! Love! Favourite movie is Love Actually.’

Conor likes Love Actually, actually, and makes a mental note to never mention this fact to her. ‘Ah, I see … into which one though?’

She cocks her head to the side. ‘Hmmm … it’d work equally well in both.’

‘You’re terrible, Muriel.’ He throws away the phone and wrestles her back on to the pillows.

‘Muriel? Is that an ex?’

‘Muriel’s Wedding?’

‘What?’

‘Never mind. Archaic film reference. I forget sometimes you were only born in the nineties.’ Immediately he regrets referring to their age difference.

The phone starts to ring. Conor looks at it, grimaces, but ignores it.

‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’

‘It’s just my sister with some drama involving Mum. Frances only ever rings to offload about her latest drunken shenanigans. I’ve too much on to get involved now.’

Lara reaches out from under him, picks up his phone and presses Accept. She hands it to him. ‘Speak,’ she mouths.

Conor rolls his eyes at her but sits up and puts the phone to his ear. Lara stays lying down and watches his naked back as he listens to his sister. As the one-sided conversation progresses it seems to Lara as though he is shrinking. His spine compresses and his broad shoulders curve inwards. He says nothing, starts to shake. She realises, with a voyeuristic thrill, that the great Conor Tobin, celebrity charity boss, media darling, New Zealand’s Most Eligible Bachelor 2018, is sobbing like a baby.

Despite it being only five degrees outside and not much more in the draughty studio above a shoe shop on Dublin’s Wicklow Street, Sinead gets up to turn off the radiator that suddenly feels as though it is directing its hellish heat solely at her. She wants to open the sash window too, but from previous experience knows that its age and size require a greater energy than she could possibly muster.

Also, the seven participants in her express yoga class are already giving her funny looks.

‘Won’t take us long to warm up!’ she says.

She sees a regular attendee, Carina, side-eye her best friend Joanne. Or perhaps it is Joanne side-eyeing Carina. She finds it hard to differentiate between the two, with their asymmetric blonde bobs and matchy-matchy lululemon gear. Their frequent asides to each other during practice are irritating and disruptive.

And Sinead knows the type well. The type who replaced the biscuits in your lunch box with a note saying, We’re staging an intervention Sinead, it’s for your own good! Or the type who left a Valentine’s card in your bag from the most popular boy in the class and cackled hysterically when you read it, flushing, allowing yourself to believe, for just the briefest of moments, that it was genuine.

‘Let’s start in Sukhasana. Now … I want you to earth yourself to the ground … then align your head over your heart … and your heart over your centre of gravity. Close your eyes and start to focus your awareness inwards on this alignment. Now … start to deepen your breath.’

Sinead feels breathless just saying this. Her own awareness is focussed solely on her lungs, which feel as though they are about to combust with each exaggerated inhalation. She goes to take a swig from her water bottle and is crushed to find it empty. She can’t remember drinking any of it. Sweet Jesus, she’d sell her soul for a drop. Perhaps taking two of those little yellow pills this morning wasn’t such a good move. But the results are astounding. Over half a stone in one week with no deprivation at all. She’s been able to eat as much as she likes. Unlike speed, which deadened her appetite and left her with an aching jaw, or MDMA, where the horrible comedown negated all the previous euphoria, these little golden wonders magically burn the fat away without any of the paranoia and self-loathing. Well, no more than usual, anyway. She hadn’t questioned Brad – the shredded Aussie powerlifter at her gym – too intensely about the chemistry involved. He emphasised that it was a short-term thing though. She thinks with results like this she could handle a week every couple of months. But maybe next time she wouldn’t teach any yoga.

‘I want you to let go. Let go of the outside world and all its stresses. Let go of your own resentments and frustrations. Embrace the here and now. Embrace yourself. Love yourself. Lose yourself …’ Eminem’s song starts in her mind. She tries to refocus, shakes her head to dislodge the song, and a bead of sweat falls from the end of her nose to the wooden floor. She hopes Carina/Joanne haven’t seen it. Or the spreading stains under her arms. Perhaps she can manipulate the poses so she can guide an entire class without raising her arms above her head.

And just like that she is thirteen again, in Tauranga High School, puce and sticky after PE, trying to get changed back into her uniform without exposing any of her body.

What’s red and white and round all over? Sinead after a game of netball!

Sinead jokes became quite the craze for that first year in high school. She had been burdened not only with the fat gene, but also with a moniker that made her an anomaly in a New Zealand school full of Kims, Kates, Beccas and Nickis. She had been hopeful that a certain Irish ingenue with the same name and a hugely popular international ballad in 1990 would go some way towards making her appear a bit cooler. Instead, that shaven-head. . .