Rules for a Perfect Life Read online

  By the same author

  Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife

  Confessions of a Demented Housewife

  Letters to a Love Rat

  Rules for a Perfect Life

  NIAMH GREENE

  PENGUIN

  * * *

  IRELAND

  PENGUIN IRELAND

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2010

  Copyright © Niamh Greene, 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-141-04866-6

  ‘They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.’

  Winston Churchill

  Table of Contents

  Rule One: Be professional

  Rule Two: Always have a Plan B

  Rule Three: Nourish your soul

  Rule Four: If you can’t be the sun, don’t be a cloud

  Rule Five: Keep an open mind

  Rule Six: Expect the unexpected

  Rule Seven: Honesty is the best policy

  Rule Eight: Never work with children or animals

  Rule Nine: Remember that he who angers you conquers you

  Rule Ten: When in Rome, do as the Romans do

  Rule Eleven: Appearances can be deceptive

  Rule Twelve: Proceed with due caution

  Rule Thirteen: Try something new every day

  Rule Fourteen: Keep cool under fire

  Rule Fifteen: Find your fun where you can

  Rule Sixteen: Beware wolves in sheep’s clothing

  Rule Seventeen: Keep calm and carry on

  Rule Eighteen: Be a good neighbour

  Rule Nineteen: Dance like no one’s watching

  Rule Twenty: Fake it till you make it

  Rule Twenty-one: Two heads are better than one

  Rule Twenty-two: There’s nothing to fear but fear itself

  Rule Twenty-three: Rules are made to be broken

  Rule Twenty-four: Just breathe

  Rule Twenty-five: Your health is your wealth

  Rule Twenty-six: Seize the day

  Rule Twenty-seven: Believe in happy endings

  Six Months Later

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  It was the yellow jelly-baby that finally did it. I hadn’t felt right about Robert for a long time before then, of course, longer than I’d dared to admit to anyone, but in the end it was a harmless little yellow jelly-baby that crystallized it all in my mind.

  For months, I’d tried to convince myself that everything was fine between us. All couples went through bad patches, it was perfectly normal, especially when you’d been together as long as Robert and I had. Even my sister Theresa, who lives a charmed life in England with her doting husband Malcolm and their angelic twins, once confided that she went through a phase of hating the very sight of her husband. It happened a short while after the twins’ arrival – poor Theresa had endured not one, but two forceps deliveries and then had the added indignity of suffering a prolapsed womb as well, all because of ‘that pervert’, as she took to calling Malcolm back then.

  The trouble was that Malcolm had promised her faithfully that he’d insist on an emergency C-section when the time came, emergency or not. But when the time did come, he never delivered on that promise. Instead he stood by, wringing his useless manicured hands helplessly as the ob-gyn – who had an unnatural preference (in Theresa’s opinion) for natural births when possible – went and butchered her on the delivery table! Then he had the audacity to go and faint when the first twin, its skull a strange, alien cone shape because of the forceps, was dragged kicking and screaming from her body.

  When she was feeling rational, Theresa said she knew that what she’d suffered probably wasn’t Malcolm’s fault as such, but still she sometimes used to lie in bed at night plotting how she might kill him. She’d once read of a man who’d strangled his wife while she lay snoring and later said he’d done it in his sleep and known nothing about it. He claimed straight-faced to the judge and jury that he was unconscious the whole time – and the amazing thing was that he’d got away with it! They actually believed him when he said he’d had no idea he was choking the life from the poor soul and that he was now racked with guilt and remorse and on seventeen kinds of pills to get over the incident.

  Theresa confessed to me that she’d started to like the sound of this plan – it seemed so simple and yet so plausible. She didn’t think it would be that hard to pull off either – she was an active member of her community theatre group and she’d had excellent experience playing a grieving widow in Fiddler on the Roof. She’d even had rave reviews in the local paper. Best of all, a legal precedent had already been established in a court of law – she could do it, of that she was sure. And if she ended up on seventeen different kinds of medication afterwards, so be it. She reckoned it might be her fate.

  Theresa said it was only when the doctor diagnosed severe post-natal depression and put her on the little blue pills that she realized how close she’d come to toppling over the edge of her perfect life. It had been craziness – all of it – and just so long as she kept taking the tablets she could see that.

  All this gave me a glimmer of hope, until I remembered that Robert and I didn’t actually have any children, so there was no post-natal depression to blame for how I felt. Besides, post-natal depression or not, Theresa really did have very good reason to hate Malcolm because he was a pervert – he’d tried it on with me two Christmases before. He’d said it was an accident, of course, but I knew he’d dropped the roast potatoes on the floor on purpose just so he could look up my skirt.

  And so I spent endless nights listening to the rise and fall of Robert’s infuriating breathing and wondering what to do. Mostly I did my best to try to ignore how I felt and plodded along with life, clocking in and out of work every day at Hanly and Company estate agents, hoping things would change. After all, the whole world was feeling unsettled and off-kilter, what with the global economic collapse; it wasn’t as if I was the only one. Robert, an architect, was feeling it too, I could tell. He spent almost every night reading unemployment statistics and muttering to himself that everyone’s heads were on the chopping block and there was no hope left.

  We would
be OK, though, I knew that. We’d have to be – we were childhood sweethearts and it was definitely against the childhood-sweetheart charter to break up. Even the thought of it made me feel sick in ways I’d never known possible. I couldn’t contemplate a split – I wouldn’t. This weirdness had to be a phase, something to be got through. It was to be endured and then discussed later, much later, when we were madly in love again and could admit to each other that we’d been through a sticky patch. We’d probably laugh about it all when we were an old married couple. Because that was what the next logical step would be: marriage. It was what everyone expected – a big white wedding. That was what two people in love did. They didn’t go splitting up when they were perfect for each other.

  But the truth was, I was starting to think I didn’t love Robert any more. How could I when almost everything he did irritated me – from the way he woke, stretching his jaws wide so they cracked noisily, then snorting violently through his tweezed, hair-free nostrils, to the way he fell asleep, his breathing getting heavier and heavier with each tiny little snore? I often felt I wanted to lean across and hold the pillow firmly against his drooling mouth, just to finally shut him up. I’d even started to keep a list of reasons why I should leave him: I couldn’t stand seeing his toothbrush beside mine in the bathroom every morning; I hated the way he poured his milk so carefully on to his cornflakes; I thought I might ram the Irish Times down his throat if he muttered the phrase ‘economic meltdown’ just one more time.

  I kept the list buried in my best Prada handbag and added to it, on and off, for months. But I never did anything about it because, after all, I wasn’t perfect either. And, besides, this was all some horrible mistake. So what if there was no excitement left in our relationship? Robert had always been naturally cautious; it wasn’t as if I didn’t know that. His idea of excitement was watching three episodes of Grand Designs back to back. He wasn’t the type to take off on mad adventures at whim – no bungee-jumping or African safaris for him. No, he was steady, reliable and utterly predictable, and that was how I had always liked it. Until, that was, everything he did and said began to either bore me rigid or grate on my nerves beyond belief. I hated myself for feeling that way. Robert was a good man, a nice person. None of it was his fault. But as time marched on, I found it harder and harder to keep pretending that things were right between us.

  The straw that broke the camel’s back happened one innocuous Tuesday night, as these things often do. We were sitting at either end of the sofa: I was channel-surfing and he was working on some complicated architectural design on his PC. Feeling completely disillusioned with work, the gloomy economic climate and the way my hair was never going to be as shiny as Cheryl Cole’s, I’d bought a jumbo bag of jelly-babies on the way home and was happily munching my way through the entire pack. I didn’t even feel too guilty about this because jelly-babies are, as everyone knows, fat-free and therefore practically good for you.

  The first time Robert leaned across and took one without asking, I bit my lip and said nothing. After all, we were a couple – a couple of many years’ standing, not some fly-by-night pair; we were supposed to share. In fact, I knew somewhere deep inside that I should have actively wanted to share with Robert. I should have been bending over backwards, trying to ply him with jelly-babies. Generously stuffing him with the things was what I should have been doing, yet there I was clutching the pack with the fierce territoriality of a truculent two-year-old. My teeth were set in grim determination: I wasn’t going to give any of them up without a very long, hard-fought battle and possibly a full-on tantrum.

  Robert, of course, was oblivious to my annoyance, which, in my irrational rage, didn’t surprise me one little bit – he was mainly oblivious to all his flaws. For example, I couldn’t understand how he didn’t know that flossing several times a day was a peculiar and unsavoury habit, but he seemed to think it was perfectly reasonable to whip the minty string from his person, even in public, and do the business in full view of anyone who might be passing. It was no wonder he saw nothing wrong with freely dipping his hand into and out of the bag on my lap with not so much as a by-your-leave, just as he had always done. My temper was at boiling point by the time he went to pluck a fourth, and when he popped that yellow jelly-baby into his mouth, something inside me snapped.

  Suddenly I knew. I just knew with blinding certainty that I couldn’t stay with him any longer. Because if I didn’t go, I’d spend the next twenty years regretting it. I might even end up doing time for murder – I’d never been anywhere near as good an actress as Theresa – and I definitely wouldn’t have coped in one of those women’s prisons. I’d seen Bad Girls on TV, I knew what would happen: some butch inmate, hair bleached with toilet cleaner, would want to be my pimp and if I didn’t agree I’d get my fingernails pulled out one by one. I wouldn’t last five minutes.

  In that moment, as Robert chewed unknowingly, his wet lips slapping noisily off each other, I made up my mind once and for all: I was leaving him. That yellow jelly-baby had finally broken our relationship in two and there was no going back.

  Rule One: Be professional

  Six months later

  ‘Maggie, there’s something about you this morning,’ Dom says, as I struggle to take off my coat and face another miserable day at Hanly and Company estate agents. ‘You look … different.’

  ‘There’s nothing different about me, Dom,’ I reply. Except that maybe I have somehow put a stone of fat on each bingo wing since I last wore this blasted coat. Why else would it have such a vice-like grip on my fleshy biceps? It’s taking a sweaty battle to get out of the thing, just like it did to wedge myself into it in the first place.

  ‘No, no, there is something,’ he goes on, undeterred, as I try to wrestle myself free. ‘I just can’t put my finger on it … Now, don’t tell me, let me figure it out for myself … Is it your boots? New, are they?’

  I pretend I can’t hear him as I finally wrench my arms out of my coat, fling it in the general direction of the stand and collapse, panting, at my desk. Playing the I-can’t-hear-you game is a tactic my sister Theresa always uses when the twins act up. Whenever they throw themselves on the floor and scream blue bloody murder, which they both often do for a wide variety of reasons – ranging from their Cheerios not being round enough to their strawberry jam not being red enough – Theresa simply pretends to go temporarily deaf. Of course, this means she often has to pretend to be deaf for most of the week. But, then, it’s a well-known fact that ignoring a naughty child and not engaging until its behaviour improves is the best policy. And Dom is a big baby who can’t behave himself at the best of times, so I reckon the same rules may well apply.

  ‘No, maybe it’s not your boots,’ he muses, changing tack. ‘Is it your skin then – have you put on fake tan? Is that it?’

  He’s not giving up. Maybe I should set up a naughty step and make him sit on it. That might work. Theresa swears by that ploy – if the ignoring is ignored, that is. Mind you, Theresa often sits on the naughty step herself, for a sneaky fag and a bit of peace and quiet – sometimes she says it’s the only thing that gets her through the day, that and the little blue pills.

  ‘I’m ignoring you,’ I say loudly, switching on my computer. I’ll stick to the ignoring for a while – consistency is key.

  ‘No … it’s not the skin.’ He puts a hand under his chin and drums his fingers against his cheek, pretending to be thinking deeply. ‘What could it be? Let me think, let me think …’

  I roll my eyes – I know exactly where this is headed.

  ‘Could it be … could it possibly be … the hair?’ He smirks.

  ‘Oh, grow up,’ I growl, and he dissolves into hysterical laughter at his little joke. OK, so I may have overdone the hairspray this morning but only because I overslept and didn’t have time for a shower. Trust him to notice – he’s such a metrosexual. He even keeps a pot of hair wax in his top drawer in case of any styling emergencies.

  I take a quick glance a
t myself in the mirror I always keep on my desk so I can do a daily check that I don’t have half my lunch stuck in my teeth. The situation is worse than I’d thought: I’d tried to sweep up my mop and do a not-trying-too-hard beehive but it looks nothing like as chic as I’d thought it did. It looks as if a very hairy, very dead animal is squatting on my head and rigor mortis has already set in. It’s a disaster. It’s all that Cheryl Cole’s fault, giving people false hope that they can ever look anything like her. It’s never going to happen, no matter how much hairspray I use.

  ‘Can I touch it?’ Dom splutters now, guffawing. ‘You know – to see if it moves?’

  ‘At least I have hair, Dominic,’ I retort, ‘unlike you …’ I search for the perfect word to wound him ‘… baldy.’

  ‘Ouch!’ He clasps his heart, as if I’ve done him a serious injury, and I try not to laugh. I’ve managed to get two direct hits there. One: Dom’s touchy about his hair – ever since he found it’s receding he’s spent ages examining his head every day to check for follical retreat. Two: Dom’s real name is Dominic but he prefers to be called Dom because he thinks it sounds hotter. He likes to believe he’s a bit of a stud – he swaggers around in too-tight trousers, jutting his crotch at anything with a pulse and calling himself a sex god. He even drinks his coffee from a special mug that has ‘Stud Muffin’ stencilled on the side – or it had until I did a bit of a job with the Tippex and changed the inscription to ‘Trouser Snake’.