Page 2 of To Hell With It
I was eleven when I was diagnosed with OCD. I wasn’t superstitious – I didn’t think it was bad luck if I saw one magpie or if a black cat crossed my path from out of nowhere, I could walk under ladders no problem and I didn’t care if it was Friday the thirteenth.
But when my grandfather was ill, I put a whole toilet roll down the loo because I believed if I didn’t he would die. When my mum walked in and saw it, she told me that he was dying anyway. I didn’t hear a voice telling me to do it or anything like that – it was an urge, a thought that came into my head before I could even work out how or why it was there.
I drank five glasses of orange juice to the brim because if I didn’t, either me, my mum or my dad would get cancer. My mum said statistically, one of us would get it anyway, but I don’t believe in statistics. Another time, I phoned the police and then hung up when the operator picked up. I thought they would cut the call, but when I lifted the receiver they were still connected. I had to tell my mum, who was mortified as she explained to the operator on the other end of the line something that she couldn’t comprehend herself.
My mum took me to see Father Michael after that because she thought I was possessed. She made him douse me in holy water, while saying The Lord’s Prayer, which I now find myself reciting over and over again whenever I’m stressed. I thought it had worked until I got home afterwards and it took me fifteen minutes to walk up the stairs because I couldn’t get up them before picturing Father Michael having sex with my mother.
It was around that time that my parents decided to get me some professional help and it wasn’t long after that I was diagnosed. I had to see a therapist once a week (not Mairéad, she came later). Her name was Lily. I saw her after school on a Tuesday. She’d come to the house with a notebook and a serious look plastered on her face, and my parents would pretend to be busy in another room whilst we sat in the kitchen and Lily tried her best to understand something she clearly couldn’t relate to.
In the end, I think she thought I was making it up for the attention, which suited my parents because it meant it was all just a phase. But it must have been a bloody long phase because nearly seventeen years later, I am still in it.
There’s more, (a lot more) but before I get ahead of myself, I should probably tell you how I found myself in this situation – the one with a naked man in my bed that Saturday morning.
I’ll start on the Thursday, when I was getting ready for work.
ChapterTwo
I’d had my breakfast, I’d done my morning routine – I’d made it down the stairs without thinking anything wildly inappropriate – and I was going to work early because Mrs O’Callaghan had called me in last minute.
But I didn’t mind. For someone like me, with OCD, O’Callaghan’s makes life easier. It is small but sells everything a person could ever need. There is even a sex section, hidden at the back, next to the wet wipes and tissues, for convenience I guess. Not that I needed it. I hadn’t slept with a man for nearly two years.
I’ve only ever seen Mr Keele linger there – his wife left him after she walked in on him having phone sex. He’d found a card in the phone box down the lane from us. I was convinced it belonged to Maggie Ryan, who is married, by the way, and lives in the village, because I recognised her handwriting from when she advertised her cleaning services on the shop noticeboard, back before she turned her hand to sex work.
I had locked the front door, yanked the handle three times because two means death and one isn’t a safe number. I had ticked off my list, and set off for work – on foot because it is only a stone’s throw from my house – though I had to turn around before I’d got down the path to the gate because I couldn’t get the thought of my hair straighteners burning a hole into my bedroom carpet out of my head.
I have thick, black, curls (and blue eyes –a true Irish woman, in the words of my grandmother) but I’ve always wanted my hair to be straight, like my best friend Una’s. I used to straighten it with my mum’s iron when I was younger because Una told me that was what she did. Only she forgot to tell me to put a piece of paper over my hair first, so I went to school looking like a bird’s nest, much to Una’s amusement.
I still got to the shop early – despite going back to check on the hair straighteners that were unplugged and cooling on my windowsill where I had left them – as I wanted to leave enough time to open up. Mrs O’Callaghan usually opens the shop as they only live upstairs, but Mr O’Callaghan was in hospital for a minor operation on his spleen so she had asked me to do it. She was just getting ready to leave as I arrived.
‘I’m sorry to call you in at such short notice, Pearl,’ Mrs O’Callaghan said as she picked up a carrier bag full of things for her husband. ‘You know how much I appreciate your help.’
‘I really don’t mind. Please give my love to Mr O’Callaghan.’ The moment I said his name, his wrinkly old penis popped into my head (Mr O’Callaghan is seventy by the way), but these are the sorts of intrusive thoughts I have. I’m not sure why I am so obsessed with penises, but I tried to push Mr O’Callaghan’s from my brain. ‘Tell him to get well soon.’
‘You’re a dear girl.’ She smiled as she pulled the door closed behind her, and then I heard the bell again as her head popped out from the side. ‘Niall will be in later, just to give you a hand.’ She winked and closed the door again before I could tell her I really didn’t need one.
Niall O’Callaghan is their only son. I think they thought they could marry us off and we’d take over the shop – when they were dead and buried – and have lots of babies to keep the O’Callaghan legacy going. I had tried to politely tell Mrs O’Callaghan that I didn’t want to do that with her son, but how do you tell your boss that the thought of having babies with her son makes you want to curl up and die? And I don’t know why it does that. There is nothing wrong with Niall really.
It isn’t that Niall is a bad-looking lad. He’s all right you know. It’s just that we have nothing in common – except perhaps that we are both an only child and as strange as each other – but I could never imagine kissing him or doing anything else with him for that matter, so how could I marry the guy and have his babies? It just isn’t going to happen.
The thing about Niall is that he is nice and quiet and polite and kind, but I find him a bit bland, really. Like, I just want to go up to him and shake some life into him, you know? Put a firework up his arse and give him a sparkler.
My mother would scorn me if she heard me talk like that about someone as nice as Niall because Niall is the sort of bloke who wouldput up with my ways.
Niall doesn’t live above the shop. He lives just down the road in a cottage with ivy green wooden windows that Una and I used to break into when we were younger. Not when Niall lived there, it was empty back then. There was no heating, just an old wood burner, and the entire downstairs had a black stone floor. There were only two bedrooms, well, one and a half because the second bedroom was a box room. But the amount of work it needed would have taken years to fix up and more money than I could ever earn at O’Callaghan’s.
I don’t actually know how Niall had bought the house in the first place because he doesn’t work at the shop full time, and I am pretty sure Mr and Mrs O’Callaghan hadn’t bought it for him. If it was mine, the first thing I’d change would be the windows – I would get rid of that depressing green and paint them ocean blue so that I could imagine living by the sea. I told Niall that once, but he’d said he’d paint the windows when the rest of the house was finished. I couldn’t be doing with that. I couldn’t be living in a house so green.
Niall walked in not long after Mrs O’Callaghan had gone and, if it wasn’t for the bell, I’d not have noticed him at all. I studied him for a moment, as he took off his coat and straightened his clothes. He had on mustard-brown corduroys, which made him appear older than he was – he is my age for Christ’s sake – and a brown woolly jumper, which was OK, I suppose, but still a bit beige. Niall is basically Mr O’Callaghan, but with hair. It is chestnut brown and as thick as mine.
Mr O’Callaghan’s penis entered my head again then, just as Niall made his way towards me, and I felt my cheeks stain beetroot at the thought of it in my hand. I didn’t want to wank Mr O’Callaghan off.
‘Trees, trees, trees,’ I muttered to myself, and though I don’t think he heard me, I can’t be sure.
‘Morning, Niall.’ I smiled as I lifted a delivery of Vaseline off the counter. ‘You know you didn’t have to come in, I would have been fine today.’
‘Thursdays are busy,’ he said.
‘Are they?’ I cast my eye around the empty shop.
