The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The following week goes by quickly – too quickly, as it always does when Fia’s off work. She makes a valiant effort to stay off her emails, too, and is mostly – although not entirely – successful.
‘Just don’t answer it,’ her mother suggests, when something particularly urgent pops up on Fia’s phone. It is so hard to explain that such an option is actually not an option at all. Fia does, at least, have Maeve there for backup. Her sister works in events management, which appears to offer a similar work-life balance to the law.
Their mother worked all her life, too, as a dental nurse at a local surgery. Although now retired, she’d definitely had her share of work-related issues over the years. Tiredness, irritation with co-workers, pressure from superiors – she knew all about those things. But it was different. There came a point, every single evening, when their mother left work, knowing for sure that she was off the clock, and knowing that absolutely nobody would expect anything different. By contrast, neither Fia nor Maeve have ever experienced working life without constant – literally constant – accessibility. The threat of a sudden demand from a boss or a client, even when that demand doesn’t ultimately materialise, is simply something to be managed.
In this particular week, it strikes Fia that she actually feels lucky – as though she is getting off lightly, as if she could hardly expect anything better – while her mother is veritably appalled by the degree of contact. How has this happened, within one generation? She wonders if perhaps everyone her age might have some kind of Stockholm syndrome. She thinks back to that first Blackberry she’d been gifted from ZOLA, aged twenty-two. How delighted she’d been. She hadn’t realized then that it was a tracking device, a leash.
Work aside, she spends lots of her week outside, tramping around the beaches and hills that did not, throughout her childhood and adolescence, seem like even remotely exciting excursions (no matter the ease of access from Dublin). At 30 years old, though, Fia discovers she’s pretty content in her jeans and raincoat, taking in the fresh air. Expansive views seem to stretch in every direction – Ireland encouraging her to look out, not up – and she’s struck, not for the first time on this trip, by how lovely it all is.
Plenty of time, also, is spent at home. That’s another thing that’s different for Fia. In New York, she is lucky to have a relatively spacious apartment – but still, there’s the urge to get out of it. Manhattan is just no place for an indoor cat. People do their work and their socializing and often even their relaxing outside their homes. Fia can’t remember the last time she spent a full day inside her own four walls. In Dublin, by contrast, she passes hours just chilling on the sofa and pottering around and – as an act of pure altruism – helping her dad create a better system for all the cascading paperwork in his office. How it all got so out of control, she has no idea.
She feels younger, in the way a person cannot help but feel when they return to their parents’ house, sit down to a meal they haven’t made, have someone suggest they take a coat. Equally, though, on this trip, she somehow feels older, too – and not older as in wiser: older as in ageing.
On Thursday, she goes for brunch with Lauren, an old school friend who’s followed the Irish playbook to the letter. That is to say, she has taken the allocated window for adventure – university in Glasgow, a year or two in Australia – before returning home to recommence her real life. Her 5-month-old son turns out not to exist only in photographs but in fact to be a real, living infant, sleeping contentedly in the pram beside them.
‘It’s so crazy that you have a child!’ Fia says, her eyes widening in what she thinks is an obviously comedic fashion.
‘I know,’ Lauren replies. ‘Sometimes, I look at him, and I just think “oh my goodness, I can’t believe he’s really mine”, you know?’
And the utterly lovestruck tone of her voice makes it clear that they have somewhat missed the mark with each other here. Fia meant something more along the lines of how alarming, not how marvellous.
Somehow, she has just been unable to shake off a certain reaction, every time she learns that someone she knew in adolescence is now pregnant. There remains the slight whiff of scandal to it in her mind. She still wonders, instinctively, what the parents will think – when, of course, the parents are probably absolutely beside themselves with joy.
On Friday afternoon, Fia overhears her mother in the kitchen with Auntie Anne. They are talking about Maeve and Conor, the upcoming wedding and all. Twenty-seven is ‘a lovely age to get engaged,’ her mother says, and Fia knows that her mam would never dream of making such a comment around her. In a certain way, she is grateful for that – not everyone is lucky enough to have such a mother; this she knows for sure. Equally, though, it does make her a little sad, the idea that there are certain things her mam would not say in front of her: the idea that there are ways in which her whole family is probably trying to be sensitive.
People, it has to be said, get a lot less sensitive by the time Friday evening comes around and a few drinks have been imbibed. The engagement party brings a crowd of friends and relatives to her parents’ house, the furniture rearranged slightly to make space for everyone, the kitchen well-stocked with beverages. Even Fia’s brother, Eoin, arrives from Cork – greeted by their mother, as ever, as though he is the Lord Jesus Christ, risen again and popping in from Jerusalem.
‘Any men on the go, over there?’ one of Maeve’s friends asks Fia conspiratorially, barely three sentences into the conversation.
Fia’s mind flashes instinctively to Benjamin. She can’t help it. Over the course of the past week, her mind has flashed in his direction quite a bit. Incidentally, he was right when he claimed that there’d be no need to physically meet with Susan Followill again. Perhaps one in-person session had proved quite enough for Susan, too. She emailed just yesterday with their draft settlement agreement, and Fia approved it in ten seconds. Across the Atlantic, she can only assume Benjamin has done the same. The document must be winging its way to a judge this very moment. For now, she pushes all such thoughts aside, focuses on the question she’s been asked.
‘No,’ she replies, feeling slightly pathetic. She shouldn’t feel that way – she hates that she does – but she knows it’s not her fault. It’s because of society.
‘Ah well, I’m sure you’ll meet somebody soon. Probably when you least expect it!’ the other girl replies.
‘Fia’s about to be made a senior associate at her firm,’ Maeve chimes in proudly. ‘She’s basically running a little legal empire at this point. In Manhattan. Can you believe it?’
‘Ooh, you go girl!’ says the friend, then, sounding more Americanized than plenty of Americans Fia knows, even though she is – according to her own recently offered bio – from Bray. ‘That’s what I like to hear. Hashtag boss bitch!’
Fia smiles along, clinks her glass when prompted, because what else is there to do? As it happens, she has zero time for the whole boss-bitch, boss-lady, girl-boss thing. Each to their own, and all – if some people found it inspirational to consider what Beyoncé might do in a given scenario, then more power to them. It just happens to leave Fia entirely cold. If she is ever put in charge of anything or anyone (beyond Benjamin Lowry), she’s certain she’ll see that as much more a matter of practicality than of personality. Even now, she doesn’t think she has any major attachment to herself as a high-powered lawyer, a career woman.
Sadly, Maeve’s friend does not know any of that. She simply cannot be stopped from launching into an impassioned speech about modern women – confident, fierce modern women – and the ways in which modern men (for shame!) are threatened by all the confidence and the fierceness.
‘I mean, look at you, Fia, you’re such a babe!’ she finishes ardently. ‘You should be fighting them off with a stick!’
Again, Fia can only smile weakly. This type of thing – almost invariably offered in some sort of feminine solidarity – has always struck her as the worst kind of compliment. Some variant of you seem too nice to be single, or too cool, too pretty – as though there is any sort of correlation.
Perhaps she might feel differently, if she found herself bowled over by every person she knows whose ‘best friend in the world’ had one day asked them to ‘do forever’, etc. And/or if she were routinely underwhelmed by those who were uncoupled, if they seemed clearly deficient in one way or another.
However, the truth is that when Fia thinks about her single friends – her single female friends, that is – the very opposite is true. They are sociable, hard-working, attractive. They are keeping pets and plants alive. They are travelling and volunteering, and they’ve read The Secret History. The idea that they are, in some sense, the exception – the confusing, unfortunate minority who somehow haven’t found love despite really deserving it – just doesn’t ring true for Fia. What a person deserves doesn’t much come into the equation, as far as she can see. There is no star system at play here. If domestic partnership illustrates anything about a person, she reckons it is merely their capacity for faith in others, their capacity for compromise with others. More than anything, it illustrates the sheer unplannable, unpredictable happenstance of life.
Of course, she can say none of that. But, as the conversation moves along, as the party continues, there is a lot Fia can contribute. There are toasts and hugs, and she feels so naturally a part of things – so intrinsically connected to these people, this place. It’s not a question of whether she wants to be; she just is. She meets neighbours she hasn’t seen for years, and she roars along to Christy Moore songs with everybody else, and when her brother Eoin throws her a precious last bag of Tayto crisps across the room – ‘Here, catch, Elle Woods!’ – she throws back her head and laughs.
Undeniably, there are a fair amount more questions about her life – how it’s going, where it’s going – from people who mean well. That Eoin (35 years old but, crucially, male) does not seem to be subject to the same questioning is not even particularly surprising to Fia any longer. It does mean, however, that she finds it necessary to consume quite a lot of wine.
Meanwhile, Maeve (for reasons presumably much more fully rooted in celebration) consumes quite a lot more wine. By the early hours of the morning, the two of them are squished together on the couch, feet on the coffee table, their mother thankfully not around to witness it. The party has thinned out considerably now, just a few remaining friends and relatives clustered around the house or back garden, the groom-to-be presumably somewhere in the middle of them.
‘Fia, I love you so, so much,’ Maeve slurs.
Fia laughs. ‘I love you, too, Maevey.’
‘No, but I mean, like, I really love you. I miss you so much when you’re in New York. I worry about you over there, you know.’
Fia did not know this, not even a little bit. ‘Worry about me?’ she replies, perplexed. ‘Why?’
Maeve shrugs, cuddling into her. It’s almost impossible for Fia to believe that this girl, her baby sister, is going to be someone’s wife soon. Maeve will have the church and the three-course dinner, the disco and the residents’ bar until the wee hours … the very specific Irish version of a wedding. None of that, of course, is the version for which Fia had been destined. In her more lucid moments, she doesn’t even overly want it. So why, right now, does it feel like a bit of a loss?
‘I dunno. Just America, you know?’ Maeve continues. ‘The guns and the healthcare. And, like, your Instagram …?’
Of all the places Fia might have expected the conversation to go, this was not it. She barely even posts on Instagram. Maybe once every couple of months, at most.
‘What about my Instagram?’ she asks with a laugh.
Maeve wriggles a bit, pulls her phone from her pocket. It seems to take her an inordinate length of time to find what she wants on there, but eventually, she does. She brandishes the screen at Fia, as though the content speaks for itself.
‘There, see?’
Fia recognizes the photo as her most recent post. It is a photograph of the exterior of her apartment building, taken back in the spring. With the cherry blossoms in full bloom, the sun shining, and a filter discreetly applied, it looks beautiful. Below, in the caption, she’s written:
Spring has sprung! But also, today I saw a rat inside an empty Ritz crackers box right here on the pavement. Everyone – EVERYONE – thinking about moving to NY should be forced to see such a sight before they sign a lease agreement.
‘And then this one …’ Maeve continues, flicking to the previous post. It shows an obscenely large slice of chocolate cake.
Fia squints, to read what she wrote there.
Hi, this is my boyfriend now. #dinnerforone
That amuses her slightly, even now, and she’s chuckling when Maeve swipes to yet another post.
By now, they’re all the way back in 2022, and Fia barely even remembers taking the photo. It’s of a ‘delayed’ sign on the metro – which, to be fair, could be practically any day of the week.
Carrie Bradshaw never had to put up with this shite, her caption reads on that one.
And, suddenly, she feels like maybe she sees where her sister is coming from.
She has never wanted to post anything online that screamed look at my fabulous life. But perhaps, she realizes now, she might have over-egged it slightly. If a brunch was enjoyed with the gals, but it didn’t make the grid, had it even really happened? She might be the only person in the world who actually makes her life look worse on the internet than it really is. She’s got the opposite problem to the likes of Alyvia Chestnut. And why, with that thought, does Benjamin pop into her head? Why is he the one to whom she wants to convey her dumb little late-night realization?
Next, a totally separate line of thinking springs to mind. Maybe, in some weird way, these photos are telling her a truth she hasn’t wanted to see. Maybe Maeve is exactly right to be concerned. Maybe, on balance, Fia doesn’t actually have a very good quality of life in New York. Maybe the levels of stress and work and expense and effort that she has come to accept as normal and necessary are in fact neither.
Could that be true? It’s very taxing to think about, in her current state of inebriation.
‘What do you want me to put?’ she challenges Maeve then. ‘“Wow, today’s view definitely beats the one from the top of O’Connell Street”? “Fantastic shag with ‘this one’ last night”?’
Maeve doesn’t laugh along, though. She’s actually almost out cold, Fia realizes.
Her sister’s reply is drowsy and affectionate. ‘I just want you to come home, Fia,’ she murmurs. ‘Me and Mam and Dad and Eoin. We all just want you to come home.’