Read Marian Keyes - Watermelon for Free Online

(briefly--as I said, if we get the time, I'll fill you in). I had been Claire the administrator. I had been Claire the wife. And now here I was being Claire the deserted wife. And the idea did not sit comfortably with me at all, I can tell you.

    I had always thought (in spite of my professed liberalism) that deserted wives were women whose husbands, pausing only to blacken their eyes, left with a bottle of vodka, the Christmas Club money and the children's allowance book, leaving them behind weeping with a huge mound of un- paid utilities bills, a spurious story about walking into a door and four dysfunctional children, all under the age of six.

    It was a humbling and enlightening experience to find out how wrong I had been. I was a deserted wife. Me, middle-class Claire.

    Well, it would have been a humbling and enlightening experience if I hadn't been feeling so bitter and angry and betrayed. What was I? Some kind of Tibetan monk?

    But I did realize, in some funny way, through the self-pity and the self- righteousness, that someday, when all this was over, I might be a nicer person as a result of it, that I would be stronger and wiser and more com- passionate.

    But maybe not just yet.

    "Your father is a bastard," I whispered to my child.

    The helpful gay priest jumped.

    He must have heard me.

    Within an hour we began the descent to Dublin Airport. We circled the green fields of north Dublin and, even though I knew that she couldn't really see anything yet, I held my baby up to the window to give her her first view of Ireland.

    26 WATERMELON

    It looked so different from the view of London we had just left behind. As I looked at the blue of the Irish sea and the gray mist over the green fields, I had never felt worse. I felt like such a failure.

    I had left Ireland six years before, full of excitement about the future. I was going to get a great job in London, meet a wonderful man and live happily ever after. And I had gotten a great job, I had met a wonderful man and I had lived happily ever after--well, at least for a while--but somehow it had all gone wrong and here I was back in Dublin with a humiliating sense of d�j� vu.

    But one major thing had changed.

    Now I had a child. A perfect, beautiful, wonderful child. I wouldn't have changed that for anything.

    The helpful gay priest beside me looked very embarrassed as I cried helplessly. "Tough," I thought. "Be embarrassed. You're a man. You've probably made countless women cry like this too."

    I'd had more rational days.

    He made a fairly lively exit once we landed. In fact, he couldn't get off the plane fast enough. No offers to help me unstow my bags. I couldn't blame him.

    27

three

    And so to the baggage pickup area!

    I always find it such an ordeal.

    Do you know what I mean?

    The anxiety starts the minute I get to the carousel, when I suddenly be- come convinced that all the nice, mild-mannered people I shared a plane journey with have turned into nasty luggage thieves. That every single one of them is watching the carousel with the express purpose of stealing my bags.

    I stand there with narrowed eyes and a suspicious face. One eye on the hatch where the bags come out and the other eye darting from person to person, trying to convey to them that I'm wise to their intentions. That they've picked the wrong person to mess with.

    I suppose it would help matters slightly if I was one of those well-organ- ized people who somehow manage to stand near the start of the carousel. But instead I'm always down at the far end, squinting and standing on tiptoe, trying to see what's coming out of the hatch, and when I finally see my bag emerging I'm so afraid that someone will steal it that I can't stand patiently and wait for the carousel to deliver it to me in due course. Instead I run to catch it before someone else does. Except that I usually find it im- possible to breach the tightly knit cordon of other people's baggage carts. So my bag sails serenely