Lifesaving for Beginners

have a drink instead?’
    ‘You’re driving.’
    ‘Just the one?’
    ‘You’re driving.’
    I don’t argue because there’s no point. Not with Minnie. If you’re driving, you’re not drinking and if you’re drinking, you’re not driving. There’s no grey area. No middle ground. She’d be desperate in a peace-talks capacity.
    I want coffee. Minnie makes me a peppermint tea. ‘No coffee after three p.m.,’ she says, as if this were a bald fact rather than a random opinion she happens to hold. She puts a sprig of mint into the tea. I unwrap the chocolate brownie she gives me. From Avoca. Minnie never buys brownies anywhere else because, she says, the Avoca ones are the best. She doesn’t do things by halves, Minnie. That’s the really great and the really terrible thing about her.
    She hands me my drink and says, ‘I’m eleven weeks pregnant today.’ Then she sits down in a chair opposite mine. ‘I still can’t get my head around it. Me and Maurice. Having a baby.’ Minnie’s eyes look bluer than usual. The whites whiter. There is something shiny about them, like a child’s eyes.
    I say, ‘I’m so happy for you.’ BAM! There’s a humdinger. Once the baby comes, there’s no way I’ll be able to drop in like this. Can you imagine the noise? And the mess? The distractions. Neither of us would get a word in edgeways, with all the squawking.
    Minnie says, ’Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you to be godmother or anything like that.’ But the way she says it suggests that perhaps she would ask me. She’d like to ask me. If I were different. A different person. A better person.
    She says, ‘Well? What’s your story?’
    ‘Me? Not much.’
    ‘Don’t fuck around, Kavanagh. The last time you called out here without letting me know was on your way home from the hospital. When Ed was sick that time.’
    ‘I was worried. I thought he was having a bloody heart attack.’
    ‘I know. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have called in. I’m merely illustrating the point that you don’t call in unless it’s some kind of an emergency. Now, what is it?’
    I take a breath. It goes straight to my head. It feels like the first one I’ve taken in ages. ‘I met Thomas the other day.’ I thought I was going to tell her about the man on the phone, but it looks like I’m not.
    Minnie opens her mouth.
    I head her off at the pass. ‘And don’t say, “So?”’
    Minnie swallows the word like it’s one of those gigantic vitamin pills that are hard to get down, no matter how much water you drink.
    ‘Am I allowed to say, “And?”’
    ‘That’s pretty much the same as “So?”.’
    Minnie makes her lips as narrow as they will go, like she’s trying to prevent words getting past them that might be considered offensive. Then she says, ‘OK, then, what else? Did you talk? What did he say?’
    ‘He’s still going out with Sandra.’
    ‘Sarah.’ Minnie tries not to sound impatient. ‘Kat, I don’t understand. I really don’t. He would have taken you back. All you had to do was apologise. For all that carry-on after the accident. And that ridiculous thing with Nicolas . . .’
    ‘It wasn’t ridiculous.’ Except it was. And not just because Nicolas is quite a bit younger than me. There were loads of other reasons.
    ‘It was ridiculous. You said he wore a T-shirt under his shirt. A Celine Dion T-shirt.’
    ‘I said I thought it was Celine Dion. I wasn’t sure.’
    ‘If you thought it was Celine Dion, then it was definitely Celine Dion. There’s no mistaking that woman.’
    ‘I was telling you about meeting Thomas. The other day.’
    ‘Go on.’
    It’s tricky to know where to begin so I begin at the end.
    ‘Ed told him about Faith.’
    ‘Faith?’
    ‘Remember when I got pregnant when I was fifteen and I went into labour on the couch in your mother’s front room and then I had a baby later on that evening – at twelve minutes past seven – in Holles Street?’
    I don’t look at Minnie when I say any of that. I look at the floor. I recite it like it’s a poem I learned a long time ago but never forgot. Like Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ No one forgets that one, do they? It’s nice and short, for a start. And bleak. That was one pretty bleak poem. I did it in third year. Again. I had to stay back because I missed the Inter. Cert. the first time round. Minnie got to wear the blue jumper and