UPFRONT:AFTER A LENGTHY absence from my familial social calendar, The Sisters' Club reconvened in my old/new house last weekend. The club is a dinner gathering established last year to keep in better touch with my three sisters – Academia, Actuaria and Eco. Proceedings are generally civilised for much of the evening and then somebody says something which serves to irk another club member and the gathering descends into medium-to-well-done acrimony writes Róisín Ingle
Not this time. Best behaviour has been promised. This is my new/old house so different rules apply and I simply won’t stand for blood on my sparkling white and slightly textured floor tiles.
Being the eldest, Academia e-mailed us to tell us who should bring which course. Eco duly brought a Mediterranean-based smorgasbord for the starter. Actuaria whipped up a chilli, spaghetti and prawn main course, while Academia assembled pear tartlets for afters. Mother, who has honorary membership of the club, had a bad cold and so sat wrapped in blankets, surveying her daughterly creations with detached curiosity, occasionally murmuring reminders about “best behaviour”, while looking like a Russian Doll.
I was relieved of all cooking duties by the sisters on account of the fact that I am 35 weeks pregnant with twins. I will never have as good an excuse for doing nothing in my life again, so I am milking it.
"Thirty-five weeks, I bet you thought you'd never see the day," said my doctor intuitively at last week's check up. I didn't. It was always an abstract thing, this pregnancy, this nine-month-long occupancy, and while I try to connect with the "babies" now by singing Speed Bonny Boatwhile soaking in a lavender bath, I'm still feeling the distance between us.
Then one of them or both of them will contort so that my belly looks as if Bernard Dunne and his corner man are trying to punch their way out of me, and I will connect with them through the medium of cursing as opposed to the mystical way I’ve been reading about in my pregnancy book.
It’s nearly showtime, their time waiting in the wings is nearly over. They know it and I know it. In preparation, I curl up in the big Ikea princess bed every afternoon for two or three hours, napping for Ireland. Every waking manoeuvre is accompanied by what my boyfriend, who has been banished up North for the reconvening of The Sisters’ Club, has started calling “man noises”. Getting up from a chair: “Ouerghhh”. Climbing the stairs: “Greuuughshhn”. Lowering self into the new free-standing ginormous bath: “Heyyghhgheu”.
Apart from that I can’t complain. No heartburn. Just the feeling that my lower back bones have drifted apart like platelets and the inescapable knowledge that an earthquake is imminent. I feel the boney platelets shift at night some times when I roll out of the bed (“beaurrrghh”) to visit our new bathroom.
The Sisters’ Club meal is uneventful. We are grown ups, sharing news and pleasantries, trying to remember if the dog that followed us home, Sam, could actually be classed as a pet, or whether the fact that he never had a lead made him his own dog. He was his own dog, we all eventually agree.
A few glasses of wine later and the sisters and their mother are up in the sittingroom watching Top 50 School Reunionon a music channel called Magic. We are talking Vanilla Ice, A-Ha, Europe and Human League here. The two older sisters are intrigued. A whole channel dedicated to retro music. One of them lives, deliberately, in four-channel land. The other has the basic TV package. They can't get over it.
Then Actuaria tells us about the man from the digital TV company who called when her children were in the bath.
“Apparently, if you don’t get digital TV by a certain deadline,” she says between sips of Sauvignon Blanc, “you turn on your telly and there’ll just be a blank screen, no RTÉ, no TV3, nothing.”
She was up to her elbows in bath water when she answered the door and this digiman was standing there, asking whether she was aware this apocalyptic scene was going to be played out if she didn’t go digital. So she told him. “I said ‘I don’t have time to know these things,’ ” and then she went back up to battle the water and children-based mayhem.
Academia said she can’t wait for the day when she turns on the telly and there’s a blank screen. “That sounds great, I wouldn’t mind one bit,” she says.
Eco spends more time on YouTube than she does watching telly, finding recipes for natural dishwasher tablets and washing-up liquid. She is trying to convince me to use biodegradable nappies and home-made baby wipes.
I make non-committal noises. She has already installed a wormery on my mother’s balcony. She made me a pregnancy care package for Christmas with a body scrub made in part from sand gathered off Dollymount Strand. She is a walking ad for how to cope in the credit crunch, chalk to my cheese. I, on the other hand, just threw away 30 yo-yos on a long-handled dust pan because it looked like something Mary Poppins would carry.
There is no acrimony this evening, just an accident with a glass of wine. All three sisters refuse to use the new-fangled dust pan and brush, preferring the regular-sized one my boyfriend bought in response to the Poppins brush. The glass is swept up, I give myself a pat on the back for painting the floorboards white instead of going for fitted carpet – think of the stains – and then to the strains of Don't You Want Me, Baby, Actuaria is telling us a familiar story about the digital TV man who called.
I suddenly see my future when these two new beings arrive. I see me up to my elbows in bubble bath, telling the digital TV man or the TV licence man that "I don't have timeto know things anymore," and repeating stories I've already told to my sisters at our acrimony-free club. I like what I see. roisin@irishtimes.com