I’m not the sort of person who can afford to reject a phone call.
I mean, I’m approaching 30 and I live alone in a turret. I don’t get to have many conversations outside of my own head. There’s the spider in the bathroom, I suppose, but she’s more of an acquaintance really.
And my mum rings me. At 8 o’clock on a Sunday evening to be precise. But when I answer the phone to her, she always sounds vaguely peeved. As if I’ve interrupted her in the middle of watching The X Factor final or something. Once, I reminded her gently that it was she who had rung me, but this only caused her to sniff loudly.
Doc used to ring me, but now she’s gone off to find herself and she’s prancing around India or Nepal or somewhere. I know, I know! One minute she’s single-handedly propping up the Irish health service, next thing she’s hung up her scalpel and scrubs and is off to see the world. Who will save me now that Doc has gone?
That only leaves Aengus.
Aengus rings me at the most anti-social times: 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning, for example; or 7 a.m. on a Sunday. This has been going on for years. And every time he rings, I answer the phone in my groggy morning voice, sounding deeply pissed off that I’ve been wrenched so mercilessly from sleep. But he doesn’t get it. No apologies. Oh no. Aengus enjoys catching me off kilter. He knows I won’t hang up. He knows how desperate I am for human contact. He knows I probably haven’t had a conversation in the past 77 hours.
So when he rang at 10 am on Tuesday morning, I thought he had finally gotten it. I thought the years of "What the fuck do you want?" had finally paid off. That he had learned to ring at a respectable hour.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
It sounded innocent enough. I thought he might really want to know.
“Having breakfast,” I said.
“WHAT? Just now? Just having breakfast now?”
“Um, yes. But I’ve been up for aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaages [a lie]. I did half an hour’s yoga before breakfast.”
I hadn’t.
“No wonder your life is so out of control. You’re eating breakfast at 10 on a Tuesday, Cow. That’s not right. Don’t you have something better to be doing?”
“I do, Aengus, I do. But I don’t want to do it. I’ve decided … [nervous giggle] that I don’t want to be a librarian after all. I’m signing out.”
“Signing out of what?”
“Of life. Of the daily grind. I’m not going to be a responsible adult anymore. It hasn’t served me well.”
“Cow, I don’t think you’ve ever been a responsible adult.”
“Well, perhaps not. But now I’m making it official. I’m not going to bother with any of that boring stuff anymore.”
“What have you been reading, Cow?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, out with it. You’ve been reading something funny. Own up.”
“Well, Rudolf Steiner if you must know.”
“Which one?”
“Um, Theosophy …”
“And?”
“And, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.”
“I KNEW IT.”
“And from now on, I’m looking out for auras, not learning how to catalogue.”
“No, he does not. Steiner believes that stones have blue auras. That couches have auras. And that Autumn is a pale moon rising.”
“Yes, he does. But he also says you have to show up for life. You have to. It’s in the rules.”
“But I don’t wanna.”
“Now, Cow, stop whining and go and do some work.”
“Mean. Mean, mean, mean.”
“And I better not catch you lying in again. I’ll be ringing you first thing in the morning from now on. You need supervision, young lady.”
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