Lover, Husband, Father, Monster
- Her Story
By Elsie Johnstone
Copyright © 2011 Elsie Johnstone
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Thank you for your support. If you enjoy this novel, you might wish to read the second book in the series, telling the story from the husband’s perspective:
Lover,
Husband, Father, Monster – His Story, by
Graeme Johnstone.
Available from smashwords.com
Lover, Husband, Father, Monster is also published in paperback by Book Pal, www.bookpal.com.au. Book Pal Edition.
Books written by Elsie Johnstone and Graeme Johnstone can also be obtained through www.loverhusbandfathermonster.com, or through online and traditional book retailers.
Published by G. & E. Johnstone Pty. Ltd.
For children everywhere who suffer because of the choices their parents make.
Table of Contents
Chapter
1
Chapter
2
Chapter
3
Chapter
4
Chapter
5
Chapter
6
Chapter
7
Chapter
8
Chapter
9
Chapter
10
Chapter
11
Chapter
12
Chapter
13
Chapter
14
Chapter
15
Chapter
16
Chapter
17
Chapter
18
Chapter
19
Chapter
20
Chapter
21
Chapter
22
Chapter
23
Chapter
24
Chapter
25
Chapter
26
Chapter
27
Chapter
28
About
The Author
The photo jumped off the screen. The sparkling smile, his hair a little lighter than I remembered it and longer than most men his age would wear it. Sitting at a set of drums, he looked almost the same as that day a whole lifetime ago I flew out of Heathrow back home to Dublin, heartbroken and melancholy, to reassemble the shattered pieces of my fragile existence. He had used me, abused me and discarded me and now, all these years later, here he was having the temerity to ask me would I be his Facebook friend?
My stomach lurched. I thought I was well and truly over Tommy. And I was! I had a successful husband, a wonderful home and three beautiful children. Tommy could never have given me anything like that. He was still a drummer, for God’s sake!
‘Jennifer,’ I inwardly counselled, ‘do not go there. It was the hottest of loves but it had the coldest of ends, so just leave it where it is. It does no good to stir up ghosts from the past.’
‘Tea, darling?’ inquired Stuart, suddenly appearing at the doorway with cup and saucer in hand. ‘I’ll just be going up to the church. They have a meeting on about Heritage Week, but I don’t expect there’ll be many there. It’ll be just the Reverend John and me making all the decisions so I wouldn’t be thinking it will take too long.’
There he stood - my Stuart, the pillar of the Church, sturdy and reliable. My husband, the very successful insurance salesman. My man, tall, fifty three years old, with a defining shock of greying hair and a comfortable but not fat body, handsome in a very ordinary sort of way.
His clothes looked well on him because he took great care of himself and he was particular about what he wore - a conservative dresser with impeccable taste. His suits were personally tailored by Louis Copeland & Sons in Capel Street and his Italian leather shoes were always shone to a bright sheen. Shirts and casual gear were bought off the peg from either Copeland’s or the House of Fraser at Dundrum. He ran at six o’clock each morning before he began his day and worked out three times a week in the gym near his business.
My Stuart was a man who gave off an air that was affluent not flashy, stylish not trendy. He was calm and controlled, the reassuring type that people tend to trust. You cannot be successful in the field of insurance if you do not market yourself, and to do that you need to monitor every part of the process.
‘Buy insurance from me and you won’t need to worry,’ was his mantra. ‘Nothing bad will happen to you and even if it somehow does, my company will put it right. Just sign here and pay me, and I will take care of things for you. I provide solidity and certainty in an uncertain world.’
In retrospect, I was just like one of Stu’s satisfied clients. When I agreed to marry him I willingly gave over personal autonomy for a warm feeling of security. I exchanged me - with all my faults, foibles and slightly harum-scarum approach to life - for the safety and insurance of a well presented husband, a good home, a reliable income and a family that would never want for anything. Stuart was older and wiser than me and made enough money to pay the considerable mortgage, send the kids to good schools and take us all abroad on a family holiday each year.
They say every person has their price. That was the down payment on the price I was to pay.
‘Cheerio,’ he said, handing me the tea, exactly as I liked it – black, weak, half a teaspoon of sugar and just a smidgin of cold tap-water to cool it down. ‘I’ll take Molly with me for the walk. Is there anything I can pick up while I’m out?’
‘No thank you, Stu,’ I said, staring at the screen. ‘I’m just looking up a recipe for dinner. I’ll head up the road myself when I find out exactly what I need.’ This wasn’t entirely true but Stuart didn’t approve of me being on-line ‘living in that lah-lah world’, his description of social networking sites.
I smiled to myself as I turned around to watch him and Molly walk hand-in-hand out the door. ‘What a wonderful picture they make, father and daughter, and how lucky am I to have three beautiful children,’ I thought. After all, for a long time I had thought that the god that governs the universe had different plans altogether for me.
Then I turned back to look at the photo on the screen. ‘Hmm. I bet Tommy the drummer wouldn’t be making his little wifey a cup of tea before heading up the hill to see the vicar!’ Things had certainly changed and I had changed with them. Best to leave it at that.
I reached for the mouse, clicked it, and Tommy and his sparkling smile, his slightly long hair and his drums disappeared.
My life was like a pond. Once there had been great excitement and activity, with different and wonderful and sometimes scary things happening down in the depths, up on the surface, along the banks and by the shores. Now things had settled. The mud had ceased its churning and lay on the bottom, vegetation had grown up to prevent too many ripples on the surface, and a rhythmic, seasonal and predictable pattern had evolved. I had reached that stage in my life where there were no surprises any more.
Here I was - Jennifer Mary Hoare, formerly O’Brien - forty eight years old, wife and mother, mellowed and stable, with everything nicely in place. Stuart Junior, our eldest, was fourteen years old and just wonderful, still very much a boy - and every mother knows just how beautiful they are. ‘What’s for dinner, Mam?’ he would call out as he came in the kitchen door, bouncing one form of sports ball or another in front of him. ‘Junior, wipe your feet and leave that outside please. You know how much it annoys your father when you bring a wet ball inside!’
‘Okay! Okay! Gotcha! What are we having for dinner, Mam?’
Life for Junior was simple - sport, food and school.
Richard, at twelve, was younger than Junior in years but seemed older in the head and more of a worrier. He was an astute people observer, in touch with what went on in the family, who said what, where did they go, what happened to whom? He listened to conversations rather than letting them go over his head and knew all the news and gossip. He was what you would call a people person. Rich was in tune with me and seemed to instinctively know if I was upset or unhappy. He loved to take his little sister Molly outside on the grass to play and always included her in his games. She in turn happily tagged along with him and his friends. ‘I love playing with Molly,’ he told me one day in confidence, ‘because she thinks I am really clever and I can teach her lots of things. But Junior, well, he always teases me and says I can’t do things properly.’
Rich possessed a high degree of emotional intelligence, something that Stu saw but didn’t like in him and so had made it his mission to make him a man. Poor Rich did his best to please, but a lot of the time he just didn’t shape up.
‘Let him be,’ I’d beg, ‘he’s only twelve. He’s just a little boy trying to keep up with his big brother and sometimes that is pretty difficult. He still needs a cuddle and so do I. Just allow him to be himself.’
‘He’s soft,’ Stu would say. ‘You’re making a sissy out of him. You’ll turn him into a homosexual. That’s what happens when a boy gets over-mothered. Get him out from under your petticoats.’
As for Molly, our beautiful little girl, Stu wanted her to be named Moira after his mother. ‘But Moira is such an old fashioned name,’ I begged. ‘She won’t thank us for it.’ I managed to hang out against him until I got my way, one of the few times in all our years together that I asserted myself. In retrospect, perhaps I should have stood up for myself more often. Maybe if I had done that in the beginning then things would have turned out very differently.
He treated Molly as if she was a precious porcelain doll. ‘She’s beautiful,’ he’d say, ‘but I feel as if I will break her.’ In some ways it was understandable; he’d had very little to do with girls, big or small.
‘Best you see to her until she grows up a bit. I’ll see to the boys,’ he’d add. So that is what happened.
I just knew my Molly would have a magnificent future and that she was going to grow into the best of Irish women - intelligent, capable, happy, optimistic and chatty, a great communicator. The world was her oyster and I was eager to enjoy the journey with her. She would be me, but ever so much better.
Do we ever entirely forget our first love? It is like the first-ever taste of ice cream on a hot summer’s day. The mother runs her finger through the soft, sweet stuff and proffers it to her baby to suck. The little one has no idea of the treat that is in store until the icy sweetness tickles the tongue and the cooling, creamy flavour explodes onto the palate. There is no going back after that. The little one pleads for more; the tiny hands are held high, demanding. Eventually, mother relents, hands over the whole cone and baby gobbles it down. There will be other hot days with other ice creams, but they will never quite be the same.
As I sipped the tea that Stuart had given me, I wondered about Tommy’s life journey in the more than twenty years since he and I were lovers. Almost everything about me had changed, that was for sure. What about him? I hadn’t thought of him for such a long time but now my memory had been jolted and, seeing as the house was quiet, I allowed myself time to indulge in the guilty pleasure of reflecting on the past.
It had been a long, long time and many, many things had happened since my days of being a young, carefree Cambridge University student known as ‘Jobby’, an acronym from my initials, Jennifer O’Brien.
Jobby, the energetic redheaded, green-eyed, much loved daughter of Seamus and Mary and adored baby sister of the entire front row of a rugby scrum. Jobby, another girl in another era when I was in the prime of my youth and having the time of my life. Jobby, newly released from the restraints of her strict Irish Catholic upbringing in Dublin and with the world at her fingertips.
My father had come from Killarney in County Kerry. The saying goes, ‘Once a Kerry man, always a Kerry man,’ and it was back to his home county we would go for family celebrations and the like, affairs that were always loud and boisterous. As children, we spent most summers with family in the Kingdom. ‘God’s own country,’ Da would say as he stood gazing at the mountains, deeply breathing in the country air. ‘Sure, it’s good to be home where we all know each other and there’s no pretendin’ or puttin’ on airs. I thank the Good Lord for landing me on this glorious piece of earth.’ He said the same thing every time.
We knew our Kerry relations well as they always stayed over at our home when they came up to go to Croke Park for a GAA match or simply to do a bit of shopping, so I grew up feeling secure and connected.
‘Be careful of Uncle Brian’s legs, he’s a diabetic you know, and we don’t want to be causing him any trouble by knocking them,’ Mam would warn me before the Kerry onslaught. ‘And whatever you do, don’t go mentioning your cousin Liam to your Aunty Agnes, she’s very upset with him and we don’t want to make her cry. And Jennifer, make sure that Dermot gets some food in him before he pours himself a drink, it calms him down and we won’t be all sufferin’ later on.’ That was the way it was in my big extended family. We were all talkers and were all mad in one way or another. It was just in the genes. Life was for living and we had fun.
Then suddenly, school days at Dominican College were over and the simple predictability of the daily rules and rituals that had made my time there so happy and secure was a thing of the past. No more prayers before class, no more piano practice, no Angelus bells at noon, hockey matches or Irish dancing lessons. I need never speak my native Gaelic language if I chose not to. Old Sister Madeleine would never again shake her head as I chattered away in class, clucking her tongue in lament and declaring, ‘Ah, Jennifer O’Brien, will you not give it a rest then? I swear if you were left all on your own in an empty room, you’d be talking to the stones in the wall. Do you ever stop, girl?’
The friends from my childhood had all dispersed and gone their own ways. My uniform had been cleaned and pressed and passed on to young Maeve down the road and my old books had been bundled up and taken to a charity shop. School had been fun and I had enjoyed it, but it was a rite of passage and now it was done. My whole life spanned out in front of me.
I had been a diligent student who enjoyed learning and had passed my Leaving Certificate well enough to obtain a place at Cambridge, studying Law. ‘Jayzus, will you look at that?’ said Da. ‘Our little girl’s off to England to study!’
But his enthusiasm didn’t come without a warning. ‘Now don’t be bringing back an Englishman to marry,’ he added. ‘Remember, we have the best men in the world here on our little island. You can’t go past them!’
My mother and father willingly gave me the opportunity and support to study abroad and I was lucky that my brothers had paved the way for me, ironing out any wrinkles and sorting out any problems that my parents might have had. Each had left home to study, had succeeded in varying degrees and happily returned home to roost. Mam always quoted the text, ‘If you love something you should let it free and then if it truly belongs to you it will return.’ Mam and Da were happy for me to take my chances on English shores and although they knew they would miss my presence in the home, I think they also were secretly pleased to finally have some time for themselves after all their child-rearing years.
There were five of us; me and four older siblings - Patrick, Daniel, Brendan and Kevin. I loved them all but it was Kevin, the next brother in age to me, who became my best buddy. Being the only girl, I was everybody’s princess but he and I shared a lot of things when we were growing up and came to be great friends as adults. Kevin saw himself as my playmate, my protector and my confidante. We played together with the other children in our street, not coming inside until half nine on summer nights; we rode our bicycles around the streets, lanes and parks of our local area; we got up to harmless fun and mischief.
Within the family we were an island unto ourselves, ‘the little ones’, as we were called, and the chores and responsibilities that all the older members shouldered somehow never landed at our feet. So we had a carefree and happy childhood, a lot of it spent on the handball courts the local kids had crafted out of the walls at the end of the cul de sac. I was as good as the boys until I began to worry about breaking my fingernails.
It was Kevin who was to be with me on that awful day that would change my life irrevocably. He was the unwitting witness to the terrible thing that would forever have both of us unable to close our eyes at night for fear that we would relive it once again in the narrow isthmus between consciousness and sleep.
The whole family accompanied me to the airport the day I left Ireland for Cambridge - Mam, Da, my brothers, their wives, my nieces and nephews. There was much teasing, jesting and many hugs and after a teary farewell, during which Mam told me that it was ‘my time in the sunshine’ and that I should enjoy it, we said our goodbyes and I headed for the plane.
‘I will really miss those crazy dudes,’ I thought as I adjusted my seatbelt. ‘But best get on with it though and enjoy the journey.’
I comforted myself with the thought that they would all still be there when I came home, wiped the tears from my eyes, and flew across the Irish Sea to the student life, where things would never be the same.
Settling in at Cambridge was not difficult. Three of my brothers had been residents at Robinson College, then the newest and most modern of the university’s many halls of residence and I carried on the tradition. It was a little removed from the centre of things and not quite as snobby as the others, and so many foreign students assembled there. Evensong at Kings didn’t interest us much and neither did the niche specialty men’s clothiers like Ede & Ravenscroft that occupied many of the little shops fronting the cobbled streets leading to the university.
As I carried my red suitcase over the drawbridge which formed the main entrance, my assigned senior, Hannah, who being an Australian was a long way from her home, touched me on the arm and welcomed me in her native twang. ‘G’day Jennifer!’ she said heartily. ‘Don’t be nervous. Here at Robinson we’re all in the same boat, mostly undergrads in foreign territory, and it is all new to us. So embrace it and learn and, most of all, have fun. Come on and I’ll show you to your digs.’ We walked and chatted together through what seemed like miles of passageways until we came to the end of a corridor. ‘This is it,’ she said. ‘Number 102, where you can put down your swag and lay your weary head, and this is your room mate.’ She motioned towards a gorgeous, gentle girl standing opposite. ‘Rhani, I’d like you to meet Jennifer, you two will be bunking in together. I’ll leave you to get acquainted but feel free to call me any time you need help. Take care now.’ With that she gave a little bow and a laugh and left us to it.
I put my suitcase down and smiled at my new roommate as she put out her hand to take mine. ‘Welcome,’ she smiled, ‘I only got here myself an hour ago, but isn’t this all lovely? Take a peek out the window at the garden. It’s gorgeous, so English and so different from Thailand where I come from.’
I was to quickly learn that Rhani’s delicate Asian beauty and quiet demeanour belied the fact that she had the brains to be studying Medicine at one of the world’s top universities. She said she had never been to my home country and I had to look up an atlas to determine exactly where Thailand was situated in the world, so we had much to learn about each other. Over many nights, lying on our beds when we should have been studying, we talked and laughed. She shared with me some of her traditions and beliefs and I came to understand her and her culture. We discussed my cloistered convent school education versus her exotic Oriental upbringing, marvelling all the while at the fact that we were both there in Robinson College, Cambridge, an oasis brimming with culture and learning where all the nations of the earth were represented and where the possibilities were endless. ‘Isn’t this exciting?’ I’d say.
As the semester progressed Rhani and I also began to spend more time off-campus together. The ceaseless tolling of the Cambridge bells punctuated every activity in the famous university town. We explored narrow laneways, leafed through old books at David’s Second Hand Book Store, tried on clothes at Edenlilley’s Department Store and ate delicious cream buns at Fitzbillies’ Bun Shop opposite the Fitzwilliam Museum. We loved the regular market in the square where they sold all sorts of produce and trinkets, Rhani saying that next time she went home to Thailand she should bring back some of the local crafts and sell them.
A couple of times we took a punt on the River Cam, but that lost its shine the day I got my oar stuck in the mud and toppled into the water. Being Irish, I don’t swim very well, but fortunately a group of gallant young men rescued me and returned me dripping, embarrassed and flustered to my college. Rhani doubled over in laughter, clutching her sides, barely able to move.
The first time I ever saw Tommy, he and other members of Amnesty International were using mime in the village square to highlight the injustices that were happening in Argentina at that time. While his face was painted white like all the others and he was wearing the same theatrical prison costume, he stood out from the rest with his stage presence, the artistic skill of his lithe moves and his obvious fervour for change. Of the group, he was the one who captured the most attention.
But, important as their cause was - the Dirty War, I think it was called, in Argentina - Rhani and I soon turned away. We were more fascinated with a long queue of people nearby who were patiently waiting to use a fascinating new device called a bank flexi-machine where for the first time you could get money from a ‘hole in the wall’.
Coming from Thailand, Rhani was a Buddhist and the more I got to know her philosophy, the more I admired her and her outlook on life. ‘Buddhism is not a religion; it is a way of life,’ she would tell me. ‘There are no absolutes and everything is open to debate. The only essential for being a Buddhist is the belief that change is possible.’ This free thinking philosophy was completely at odds with my dogmatic Irish Catholic background where everything was set in stone and not to be flouted.
Perhaps that’s why Buddhism appealed to me so much. In many ways it sat well with my Irish culture – Irishmen love a good discussion, our Celtic background was heavily involved in the spirit world, and many of us believe in supernatural things such as banshees and the little people. Rhani introduced me to her meditation groups and the world of Buddhism. Young, enthusiastic and thirsting for knowledge, I embraced this ancient philosophy and so, although I was on campus and part of university life, I gradually became separated from the student mainstream. Rhani, me and our Buddhist friends developed a subgroup within the whole.
It was on a meditation group one weekend, on the east coast of Scotland near Portsoy, that I first said ‘hello’ to another member of the movement - Tommy. For the next five years, he was to be the love of my life.
Tommy was beautiful in a delicate, exotic sort of way. His mother was Thai and his father English and their union had melded the two sets of genes to produce an amazing, universal creature that delighted the eye. He was strikingly different, the perfect representation of Eurasian chic. Oriental, but at the same time English; small boned but manly; polite, but extremely outgoing. He had been educated at the best of English schools, so he combined excellent manners with that indisputable self belief of the British upper class. Tommy was exotic, golden-skinned, doe-eyed, lithe, smart and funny. And he wore all this as a magnificent, colourful, eye-catching robe, as only a person who is completely happy in his own being can do.
I don’t think he really noticed me much at first, except in passing. The connection was that his mother, Leah, had sponsored Rhani to study at Cambridge. Their families had both come from the same poverty-stricken Thai village and Leah had heard of Rhani’s potential when she was home visiting. ‘Without Leah’s patronage,’ Rhani told me more than once, ‘I would have had hardly any education. In fact I would have been lucky if I had been able to read. I probably would have ended up getting married young and helping run the family’s food stall in the village market.’
Rhani said that Leah had been a fabulous mentor and support for her and her family all through her school years. ‘I really feel that I have to do very well to thank her and to make her proud,’ she said. ‘She’s a lovely lady.’
Tommy was at the meditation weekend with his mother, but the link between me, Rhani, Leah and him had little to do with how things panned out. It was a case of me being drawn by an irresistable magnetic force to this opposite being. He was so different to me. He would do anything for fun and he exhibited a charisma that swept people up with him. His confidence and sense of self propelled him towards being naughty, anti-establishment, a rebel. He seemed to be dancing through life like there was no tomorrow, living each day as it came, not worrying about the future, having a ball.
Being Irish, that take on life was hard for me to understand. As a nation we believe in reparation for sins committed and reward for sins avoided. We believe in Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, that place where you go to suffer so you can make up for the good times you had on earth before you are free to look for all eternity on the face of God. We chant the mantra, ‘Sure, suffering does you no harm at all; in fact it can be good for you because if you suffer in this life you are sure to be elevated in the next. There’s nothing wrong with having a good time but you’ll surely have to pay for it in the end.’ From an Irish cultural perspective, even if things are bad, they are never so bad that they can’t possibility get worse. Our nation wakes up every morning expecting it to rain, and if it doesn’t, we’re quite certain that it will rain tomorrow. At the end of the day we pour ourselves a drink and listen to sad songs about things that went wrong and which could have turned out better.
Another thing we Irish don’t like is people who get above themselves and flaunt the good times they are having and the successes they may be enjoying. ‘Ah, Mary McNamara, will y’be takin’ a look at her!’ some local will say sipping his Guinness when Mary walks into the room looking resplendent in a new outfit. ‘Does she not she think she’s Lady Muck? Just because she’s a lawyer in the city. All those airs and graces! But did y’know her mother was in one of the Magdalene laundries, run by the the nuns for the orphans? Now here’s her Mary strutting about as if she’s the bloody queen of England.’
As a race we are bitter-sweet and naturally seem to take the pessimistic, melancholic view. Perhaps that’s why, at the end of the day, we like to party - if we’re going to be ruined, and it is almost certain that we will be, then it is best that we enjoy ourselves while we can. But to be sure, we will pay, one way or another.
Tommy was the antithesis of all this. He was never negative, always believed in himself and optimistically loved life. On the surface he had everything - money, friends, style and an engaging smile. He was always very visible on campus and seemed to be a part of everything cool that was going on, having an enviable ability to sit comfortably in a variety of social situations. One of these was as the drummer in a rock band that did regular lunch-time gigs in the main courtyard. They were pretty good, too, performing a lot of their own stuff as well as the popular covers of the time.
The time they did an open-air session of African drumming drew a courtyard full of undergraduates, pounding out the beat on anything that was available - our books, our bike helmets, our bags, whatever - jamming away like there was no tomorrow. Some of the professors even felt compelled to join in. Anyone who was there that day would remember it; the whole quadrangle was alive with the beat. As the drummer in the band, Tommy led the rhythm making, his charisma carrying the day. Many of us went home that night with hands all red and swollen from beating too hard and too long.
Whichever way you looked at it, Tommy was Mr Cool. All of which captured my heart almost instantaneously. I wanted to be cool, just like him. I was a shy little Irish girl who had jumped out of the constrained shallows of her own little pond and was struggling to keep her head above the rolling waves of the big bad world. I wasn’t part of the cool group. Redheads just weren’t cool!
As well as the meditation group, Tommy was also into student politics, sitting on the Student Representative Council as spokesman for the fledgling Green lobby. When he spoke of things Green, I began to listen and I agreed mostly with what he said and, because I wanted to be where he was, I got involved. He often spoke out on the causes espoused by Greenpeace which was, at that time, an embryonic organisation operating out of dingy little offices above a gym in South London.
‘Our precious planet is being destroyed by the excesses of big business and compliant politics and this has to be stopped,’ he would declare. I got involved initially by doing small things like handing out pamphlets around the campus or setting up an information counter in Cambridge itself, but as time went on I became very active on several fronts. It was the major campaign to halt the French nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific that caught our imaginations - and brought us together.
‘We have to let the French know that they are being watched,’ said Tommy one day to a small group of us in the café. ‘By letting bombs off underground they are cracking and destroying the atolls.’
‘What are we going to do?’ someone said.
‘Greenpeace aims to prevent the detonation of bombs by placing boats in their way. I’m going out there to do my bit. Does anyone want to join me?’
I can’t remember if I put my hand up or murmured ‘yes’ or simply nodded, but I know my stomach was churning with anticipation and my response was almost instantaneous. And that is how I found myself during the long summer break of 1982 with Tommy and a few other like-minded souls aboard a ship that was part of a flotilla near Muroroa Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
Perhaps it was heat of the tropics or the perceived danger and excitement of our mission or maybe the beauty of our surroundings, I don’t know, but our feelings smouldered - a touch, a look, a glimpse, a word - until one night while we were both on watch we reached for each other and entangled ourselves helplessly and irretrievably amongst the sheets of both the boating and bedding kind.
I gave myself entirely to Tommy and in so doing fell hopelessly and madly and head over heels in love with him. We couldn’t take our hands off each other. I would have gone to the end of the earth and back for my Tommy. Although we prevented a bomb being exploded while our flotilla hung around, as soon as we sailed off, the French let one loose anyway. But it didn’t matter. He was my first love. I started out on that expedition a virgin and came home a woman in love. I had found sex and I loved it.
On our return, the news spread around the campus, the Buddhist circles and the music scene, ‘Hey, did you hear about Tommy? That little Irish girl is his new girlfriend!’
I still lived in my student digs but little by little I began spending more time at his shared house with his band mates. It was a cool party place, with lots of comings and goings and life never, ever being dull. Although Tommy’s band was not big time, many of the other musicians and groupies that came, strummed, drank, smoked, crashed and left, belonged to popular bands of the time. And so we were always going to gigs, making music or just doing wild and zany things - things that you can only get away with while you are still young enough to escape the consequences. I was cool at last! The shy little redhead from Dublin had made it. We were the coolest couple on campus.
With this newfound lifestyle there came a down side. I was not a drinker. I didn’t like the way it made me feel. I still don’t. But there was a lot of pot being smoked in Tommy’s house and little by little I began to indulge. At first I’d share a puff as the joint was passed from one to another, then I began rolling my own. Later I began procuring supplies for my friends and me until, in the end, I was so spaced out I ceased going back to my bed at Robinson and hardly went to university at all. Tommy had certainly introduced me to his hedonistic world, the one that I had aspired to so much - the world of parties, music, politics and recreational drugs - and I had jumped right into it. We sometimes attended classes but most times we were too busy getting over the previous night’s buzz or preparing for the one ahead. We made love and were in love. There was no world except the one in which we existed. That semester and the next, my study habits were erratic and for the first time in my life, I failed to achieve my academic goals.
‘What is going on, Jennifer?’ Rhani asked me quietly on one of the rare mornings I turned up at our shared room. ‘I do not understand. Your grades are suffering. This course should be so easy for you.’
I had no real answer, and I had no real worries either, because I was in love and as long as Tommy was with me, I was happy. Life was grand. It was our time in the sunshine and we were enjoying every minute of it. It would not have mattered to us if World War 3 had broken out; we were enthralled in our own little world where tomorrow, with all its needs for study, exams and a career, seemed eons away. We danced through each day as it came.
I took up with Tommy boots and all, neglecting my own friends and hooking myself into his network. His friends became mine. My birth family had taught me to trust and that is just what I did. I loved wholly and with my all. I had been brought up to look after my man and anyone else in the vicinity who may have needed nurturing. It was never an even relationship.
While Tommy was virtually my whole world, he did not rely entirely on me for company or intellectual stimulation. He had his music, his student politics and by now was becoming an important spokesman for the ecological movement, often being asked to comment on all things Green. He also happened to be at university, but that didn’t worry him too much. He passed some subjects but, by and large, he was a ‘professional student’; he came, he enjoyed and he crammed at the last minute for exams. Sometimes he absorbed the right stuff and achieved acceptable grades, sometimes he didn’t and he failed. When summer arrived, he would charm his way through the usual committee evaluation of his efforts and turn up the following term flashing that engaging smile, set for another year as Mr Cool. His father kept paying the bills on the share house and he always seemed to have enough money to do pretty much as he liked. It looked like he was going to stay at Cambridge until he was thirty.
I was soon to learn that while Tommy may have enjoyed all the material comforts throughout his childhood and study years, what he did not have was domestic peace. Leah, his beautiful Thai-born mother, had met and married his father, an English barrister, when she was studying and working in London as the court stenographer on a murder case in which he was involved. But the bubble soon burst, the marriage didn’t work out and after years of argument and vitriol they separated when Tommy was twelve years old.
Tommy went to live with his mother and from that point on, saw his father only on monthly access visits to the new love nest, presided over by his stepmother, Janine. She was in her early twenties when she came on the scene, not much older than Tommy, and deliberately made things difficult so that the visits were miserable. ‘I never feel I belong there,’ he told me one day after yet another unhappy journey up to London. ‘I positively hate going because Janine is always on my back about something. And I just can’t stand the way she flirts with Dad as if I wasn’t in the room. It makes me sick when I see them together.’
He felt he was an outsider looking in on the cuckoo’s nest that had been vacated by his betrayed mother. There was always tension between him and Janine, between his father and Janine and between him and his father. It was the price his father paid for taking a second wife young enough to be his daughter. Later, the couple had twins and the only difference it made for Tommy was that he was now practically banished from his father’s life altogether. Sleep deprived nights tending two babies made his step-mother tired and even more irritable so that she constantly spat venom at him, making it almost impossible for him to be in the same room as her. She resented Tommy, didn’t want him there and made this quite clear. She wanted her husband for herself and her children. Ultimately, his father acquiesced. It was almost as if he did not want to be reminded of his previous failed marriage and the son that it had produced.
However, the old man was happy to keep writing the cheques because as far as he was concerned, Tommy could have as much money as he wanted as long as he didn’t show up at his home and annoy his young wife and their two daughters.
The other personal cross Tommy had to bear was that his mother, Leah, was busy trying to get on with her own life but with little success. She seemed to be permanently unlucky in love. Across the years she had had a conga line of lovers, none of whom respected her or treated Tommy well. She had the knack of attracting the apparently unobtainable, only to find herself being discarded when the target of her affection finished using her as a plaything. Tommy hated this and could not bear to watch it happen.
Once I went with him to his mother’s place for Christmas dinner. It was a very quiet affair - Tommy, me, Leah and her partner at the time. This one, a fat surly builder/developer, had drunk too much Christmas cheer the night before and was hung-over and grumpy. Despite Tommy’s best efforts to get conversation going, we ate in subdued silence.
Although she had been living in London since her student days, her roast chicken still tasted of the spices of her native Thailand. And instead of potatoes and roast veg she served fried rice and stir-fried vegetables. She and Tommy enjoyed a side dish of hot chilli but my taste buds could not cope with that. For sweets she made banana fritters and ice cream.
‘Did you like what Mum cooked? No potatoes?’ Tommy whispered anxiously as we washed the dishes together in the tiny kitchen.
‘I certainly did,’ I said. ‘The whole meal was just like you. Exotic, enjoyable and so delicious!’
Afterwards we went for a walk around the common. Leah’s grumpy sidekick didn’t come, as he wouldn’t pull himself away from the warm lounge and television. By herself, away from the tension of the house, Leah was talkative, humorous and loving towards Tommy and me. It began to snow as we were heading home and she held her hands out wide and ran around trying to capture the snow flakes in her palms. She was light hearted and free and so we copied her, laughing as we ran. As soon as we went back indoors, Leah became a subservient little Asian woman again, tiptoeing around her over-bearing Englishman and trying to please him. It was demeaning to watch and I realised then how it made Tommy feel. Her humiliation was his and he didn’t want to be there.
We didn’t stay the night. Instead we cut the visit short and went back to the share house after tea. Despite his outgoing confidence, Tommy was torn between two worlds and it bothered him. He was protective and paternal towards his pretty mother but he needed his distant father to finance his lifestyle. In one way, he was a free spirit but in another he was a prisoner of his childhood.
Because of that, he found it difficult to give himself entirely to me, as there was always an element of distrust lurking in the background. In a private world to which I did not have access, he always kept a part of himself for Tommy only. He said to me once, ‘Don’t ever expect me to marry you, Jen, because I won’t. I will never marry anyone. Marriage? It’s all a sham. People say they are going to love each other forever but they don’t.’
Another time he stated, ‘I will never marry and I will never bring a child into this world, a place where everybody tells lies and everything is such a mess. Besides, it will all blow up soon, just look what they are doing in the Pacific.’ When he went on those melancholy rants, he would always add, ‘But, Jobs, I do love you; you’re my sweet, little Irish leprechaun.’
Did it worry me? Well, I was young. Marriage was definitely not in my plans at that moment, anyway. So, I took it all with a grain of salt, not thinking about it, just enjoying being with him.
After we had been together for more than three years, at my mother’s insistence, I persuaded Tommy to come with me to Dublin for Easter to meet my family. We flew with Aer Lingus and there they all were, waiting at the airport, faces glowing with anticipation - my mother, my father, my four brothers and their wives and partners and by now, a growing cluster of blue eyed grandchildren. Customs officers delayed Tommy and went right through his bags, no doubt because of his pop star looks and cheeky demeanour. I emerged a good ten minutes before he did and walked out to a huge welcome. Everyone was so pleased to see me and they all were talking and laughing at once and passing me around to be hugged and kissed. The noise was unbelievable as we chattered furiously while waiting for Tommy. It was grand to be home!
I turned and said, ‘Oh, there he is,’ as he emerged through the door, and I ran to take his hand and bring him into the fold.
The talking stopped. It was like a pause in a film. Several seconds of silence elapsed while this vision of a cool dude Asian rock god amiably sauntered towards them.
And then, just as suddenly, it started again, with everyone all talking at once. He was not what they had expected at all. He was too petite, too beautiful, too exotic, too ‘out there’ in his clothing and attitude. They were expecting someone like all the other men in our family - big, silent, blue eyed, sporty types who stood solid and firm. When Tommy materialised before them they were a little taken aback. But he didn’t care, he needed no one’s approval and he was very happy in his own skin. And so he greeted them in his casual way, giving high fives to all the kiddies, shaking hands with my father and brothers, kissing any female face that came near him, and giving my mother a huge cuddle. Then, he put his arm around me, planted a kiss on the top of my head and told Mam that she had done ‘a pretty good job here, Mrs O! Jobs is way cool.’
Well, that was it. Give them their due, once my mob realised what they were dealing with and got used to the idea, they embraced Tommy and gave him a big Irish welcome that secretly frightened him to pieces. For the next few days he became one of us and was privy to all things family. Nobody ever stood on ceremony for long in our home and Tommy was soon sitting comfortably at the kitchen table drinking tea and joining in the yarning and singing. While they thought he was exotic, he was in turn entranced by my mad mob because he’d had never seen anything like it. It was so far from his experience and concept of family that he was gob-smacked. Based on his cold, fractured experience, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. ‘The talking, the eating, the cups of tea, the pints of Guinness that they are able to consume,’ he said to me later. ‘They never stop. They never leave the kitchen table!’ It was a whirlwind of tales, talk, bagging, teasing, laughter, singing and occasionally scolding.
Throughout all this, the kiddies came and went - a drink here, a scone and jam there, sweets galore and plenty of hugs and teasing. They’d be in and then out to play in the street again with all the other kids. It didn’t matter in whose kitchen we were sitting there was always other children in the street to play with - soccer, football, bikes, roller skates or hide and seek. They ran and ran and only came inside for sustenance or if the rain was pouring.
Sometimes one of the men would go out to check on them and to kick the ball around a bit. Tommy did more than his share of this as I think at times he preferred playing with the little ones than trying to keep up with the witty exchanges that went on inside the house. The kids loved him as he seemed to have a natural ability to play. After all, he had played pretty much all of his life, and to him, life was all a giant game where it was simply enough just to take part. It wasn’t about winning. He had been around music and show business for a long time, so he knew how to entertain, and that is what he did. When he went out to play there was great merriment in the street and cries of, ‘Tommy, Tommy! Kick it here, kick it here!’
He showed the neighbourhood kiddies his magic tricks from his busking days and organised drumming jams using any rhythmic objects they could find to beat. One night he had twenty or thirty adults and God knows how many children pounding away in my eldest brother’s lounge room. It was so much fun. My brothers embraced Tommy even though he wasn’t their football playing type and my sisters-in-law adored him. Women just did.
He enjoyed the applause. But while he loved it and envied me the fact that I always knew my family stood shoulder to shoulder behind me, supporting and loving me unconditionally, I also think he found it hard to cope with the rowdy familial intimacy which could lead to a lack of privacy and down time. When the moment came to return to England, after all the tears, smiles and goodbyes, I think he quietly breathed a sigh of relief to be returning to a place where nobody expected anything of him.
That was the one and only time Tommy met my family. Not long after we returned from Dublin, our romance started to fall apart.
Perhaps it was the trip back to my home territory, with all its noise and laughter and silliness, that began our demise as a couple. But I think it was simply the circumstances, the time line and the events that were about to unfold. When we got back to the share house the place was ablaze with the news. Tommy’s band had been asked to be a support act for the Rolling Stones on tour. They had played a gig in support of a Greenpeace initiative and a talent scout had seen them and decided that they were good enough to open for the Stones but not good enough to outshine them. Everyone was excited but there was little time to be lost as they needed to rehearse hard so that everything was note perfect when they went on the road in six weeks’ time.
‘This is it, Jobs!’ Tommy would say excitedly as he’d head off for another practice session. ‘This is it!!! Our big chance. The break we’ve all been dreaming about!’
You couldn’t blame him. Tommy and the boys had been working towards a chance like that for more than three years. Opportunity was knocking and he was answering that door, there was no question about it. This was his moment for glory and nothing was going to get in his way. Not even our relationship, if it came down to that. If he did think that perhaps he might miss me, he certainly never verbalised it.
I assumed that I would go along with him and said, ‘I’ll defer, just for this semester, and go on the road with you so we can be together. Besides, I’ve never been to any of those places. It’ll be fun.’
‘This is my gig, Jobs,’ he said solemnly, ‘and really has nothing to do with you. It’s for me and the boys and we’re not paying for any of the accommodation and stuff so I don’t think hangers-on will be welcome. Best you stay here.’
‘But you’ll be away for months!’
‘It won’t be long before we’ll be back together. And I’ll phone you every night, promise.’
‘Great …’
‘Jobs, this is something I have to do on my own. You understand, don’t you?’
Deep down I could see his point so I agreed that, painful as it was, we would do our own thing - he tour with the band while I took the opportunity to clean up all the academic odds and sods that I needed to get my degree finished.
That tour was the beginning of the end for us. The Stones had more than enough groupies hanging around for themselves and all other comers, and apparently a good time was had by all. I am not saying that Tommy was unfaithful, but it opened up a world of possibilities to him that he had previously only dreamed about. The whole thing was a success and out of it, Tommy was eventually singled out by a record label and offered a job as a studio drummer. People generally tend to underestimate the importance of the drummer in a group of musicians, but he is essential to the shape, soul and depth of the music. Lousy drummer, lousy band! The record company understood that. ‘The rest of your crew are shit, man,’ they told him on the side, ‘but you’ve got talent.’
The final gig of the tour was in Glasgow. The good news was that as soon as it ended Tommy was able to hitch a ride down south, rather than having to wait to return in the band coach with the entire entourage, so he suddenly turned up at home earlier than I expected. We had missed each other terribly. The reunion was wonderful and we rejoiced in each other, unleashing our passion until we were spent.
In order to save a bit of money and as I was a one-man woman and had no intention of having sex with anyone other than Tommy, I had stopped taking the pill while he was away. I had remained celibate while he was on the road and although I started taking it again immediately he came home, I was one day late. The deed was done. When my period didn’t turn up on time I freaked out and immediately made an appointment at the women’s health clinic on campus. It didn’t take long. They confirmed my pregnancy.
As one of their counselors went over the options with me, my emotions were mixed. I was half terrified and half thrilled. I didn’t want a baby at this time of my life and yet I did want Tommy’s baby. I felt a sense of loss at the thought that I was losing my independence but a sense of excitement when I walked into Mothercare in High Street and lovingly looked at the baby clothes and the toys and the prams. I could imagine our beautiful baby, ‘And he will be beautiful,’ I’d say to myself, ‘just look at his daddy’, all wrapped up and snuggled within. In my Irish way I was thinking, ‘Whatever will be, will be, God knows what is best for me,’ while deep down in my heart intuitively knowing that Tommy would not be thrilled when I told him the news.
He wasn’t.
First came the anger. ‘Pregnant! What do you mean, you’re fucking pregnant? Why did you go and do that? Can’t I even trust you to take a fucking pill?’
Then came the mistrust. ‘Are you sure it’s my baby? I know, you’re just doing this to make me marry you, aren’t you? How do I know that you weren’t fooling around with some other Joe while I was away?’
And finally, the self-interest. ‘What about my drumming career?’
He angrily fired the questions at me like ball-bearings shot from a cannon.
I had certainly expected shock and maybe a smidgin of disbelief, but never dreamed that he would doubt my faithfulness to him or accuse me of deliberately getting pregnant. I shot back with my voice raised. ‘What I mean, Tommy, is that I am pregnant with your baby, not anybody else’s baby, your baby. I have never had sex with anybody but you, so it can’t belong to anybody else but you. And if you had phoned and let me know that you were coming home early instead of turning up on the doorstep all horny as hell, I would have started up the pill again before you got home. Besides, it was about time you started using a condom because by telling me you don’t trust me, that tells me something about you! I don’t know where you’ve been. So don’t go getting on your high horse and telling me that I tricked you into it. It takes two to tango, you know, and you’re in this right up to your ears with me. Instead of accusing me, start talking rationally about where we go from here. I’m the one carrying your baby and I want answers!’ By the end of the diatribe I was hysterical and crying.
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