Nina had also joined them for the evening and was looking forward to a rare night out. It wasn’t often she got to be a young woman with no responsibilities or cares and she intended to have fun. Mrs Flaherty had declined Aisling’s invitation on the grounds of her bedtime being nine pm these days and young Evie who worked the weekend evening shift on reception, was precisely that, young.
‘You can’t,’ Moira said, craning her neck to look back over her shoulder. She’d been standing by the dining table chatting to Aisling’s old work friends when Maureen had caught sight of her skirt and nearly spilled her G&T.
‘I can. They’re purple and barely cover that arse of yours.’
‘Well it is a hen night, Mammy. We’re supposed to cause all sorts of trouble around the town. And what do you call the get-up you’ve on?’
‘The only trouble you’ll be getting, my girl, is the back of my hand on your bare legs. Now go and put something suitable on. I’ll not have a daughter of mine flashing her knickers to all and sundry.’ Maureen flicked her hand in the direction of the hallway, shooing her off.
Moira ignored her, knowing it would take too much energy for Mammy to get up from the sofa to smack the back of her legs. Her glory days of being fast as lightning with the wooden spoon were over. She took in her mammy’s white cowboy boots and her eyes travelled upward. ‘Jaysus, Mammy, please tell me those aren’t rhinestones on your blouse.’ She was wearing a black skirt, nothing wrong with that. It was a perfectly respectable knee length teamed with a long-sleeved silky black blouse which revealed a tad too much cleavage in Moira’s opinion. One Cindy in the family was enough. It was the sparkly, swirly pattern across the chest she took umbrage with. It looked very much like rhinestones. All she needed was a big fecky off, cowboy hat, big blonde hair, enormous boobs, a smaller waist and the ability to hold a note, and she’d be like an Irish Dolly Parton.
‘They’re diamantes not rhinestones.’
‘You’re like a grandmotherly version of Madonna changing your look every fecking few minutes,’ Moira muttered.
Maureen lunged forward and Moira scooted around the other side of the table, smirking as she saw Mammy was all hot air. She hadn’t managed to make it out of the seat.
‘Enough of the language on your sister’s special night,’ she said, settling back on the cushions and giving her gin and tonic, the attention it was due.
Ita looked down at her carefully chosen black dress with its white polka dots, bought specially for this evening from River Island. It had cost her nearly a week’s wages and she’d teemed it with black knee-high boots as the shop assistant had suggested. She’d felt a million dollars when she’d left home earlier, her mam’s voice ringing in her ears. ‘Be sure to remember me to Maureen, now Ita.’ She’d wanted to impress the O’Mara sisters who only ever saw her pushing a cleaning trolley about the place. She felt certain they looked down their haughty noses at her and she’d planned on showing them she scrubbed up as well as the next girl. Now though, looking at Moira in her tiny scarlet skirt she felt frumpy, as though she were off to a church social and not on a hen night. Her stomach knotted in the way it always did when she was around the O’Mara sisters.
Bronagh put in her penny’s worth. ‘Moira, if you prance around the city streets in that skirt, you’ll be offered money in return for favours. Mark my words.’
Moira frowned, not sure what Bronagh was on about, her mammy’s message had come across loud and clear though. ‘What I want to know, Mammy, is why it’s alright for you to swan around the city in your yoga pants showing everyone your bits but I can’t wear a short skirt when I’m in the prime of my youth.’
‘The yoga pants are very good for the mobility so they are. I can bend and stretch and get in and out of the car and remember, young lady, you’ll still be my daughter when you’re sixty and past your so-called prime. Besides, I’m after getting a new pair. It won’t be me flashing my undergarments to anyone who cares to take a look.’
Roisin looked up from where she was scooping paté onto a cracker over by the kitchen worktop. ‘What do you mean you’ve got a new pair?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Mammy, have you been nosing in my suitcase?’
Nina was sitting in the armchair near the windows and her head swivelled back and forth, like a tennis ball being thwacked across the court, between the sisters and their mother. She would never answer back to her madre the way these girls did theirs but she envied their easy relationship with her too.
Maureen had a shifty expression on her face but before Roisin could grill her further, Leila appeared looking glamorous in a silver halter neck dress.
‘Leila, you look a picture, so you do,’ Maureen exclaimed, grateful for the diversion.
‘Thank you, Maureen, but wait until you see our bride. Aisling,’ she called.
Aisling came striding out with her hands on her hips as though strutting the catwalk. Roisin whistled and Maureen and Bronagh clapped. Aisling’s two girlfriends from her resort management days, Rowena call me Ro-ro and Tina-Marie like Lisa-Marie Presley only it’s Tina-Marie
