The Cougar Diaries, Part III

By Aoife Brennan

The Cougar Diaries Part III is the concluding novel in Aoife Brennan's contemporary Irish trilogy. Parts I and II have Aoife struggling to deal with life post divorce,. Her ex is of no help, indeed he is a positive hindrance, while her own lawyer is not much better. She must find her way again looking after her teenage boys, coping with impact of the deep recession in Ireland and then learning to live and love again.

The final book has Aoife face some of her most difficult trials and help her navigate her path through life. Will she have the courage to stay the path? What new experiences and challenges will she face? These books should really be called the Courage Diaries rather than The Cougar Diaries. We are all rooting for Aoife as she keeps on going.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aoife Brennan
• Release date: Dec 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310618468

Aoife Brennan

I am the author of The Cougar Diaries Trilogy. I started off writing a non fiction book about divorce which suddenly segued into fiction - so I took all I knew about dating again and fictionalised it. What a hoot! I am the author of my own destiny now - I am writing the ending. So I can lead my main character through the valley of death, despair and trouble, but I am giving her a fabulous ending! Oh the power of the pen! So, when possessions depart – and bravery enters by the main door – then it is time to write! Follow Aoife Brennan as she follows her heart in the search for true love. Ireland, post Celtic Tiger, is the backdrop to Aoife's tumultuous journey from Dublin to Athens and back in her pursuit of love in a recession. She faces loss of her job, her home being repossessed and the crazy legal system. Can she overcome against the odds? Aoife is a survivor and come witness her journey.

Book preview

Chapter One

‘She’s pregnant.’

‘What?’

‘She’s pregnant.’

‘How on earth did that happen?’

‘How do you think, Mam?’

‘No, I mean, how on God’s earth did your girlfriend get pregnant in this day and age?’

I was red-faced and in shock. I was in every mother’s nightmare: teenage son about to enter final year in school with important exams and all of a sudden his equally teenage girlfriend is pregnant. My brain went blank and then exploded like fireworks. Denis cowered in front of me but I wasn’t angry. I was just terribly upset. Why? Why now? How on earth? How on earth had this happened in Ireland in 2013? How had this happened to my beautiful baby?

Later I spoke with Trish. ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Sometimes kids get it wrong. They miss a period and panic.’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ I said. ‘Denis says she hasn’t even told her mother yet. He was just upset and wanted to talk. It’s not something he could share with his friends over a pint.’

‘He’s only just old enough to drink a legal pint,’ pointed out Trish and then said the obvious: ‘He’s still a baby himself.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Denis did talk about it. Deirdre is on the pill and has been for the past year. He even contributes to the cost which impressed me, it’s not cheap. She reckons she had a tummy bug and that was why it wasn’t working. She is only a week late but she said that never happens.’

‘Why didn’t they think of the morning after pill?’ said Trish.

‘They didn’t know there was a problem until she missed her period,’ I said. ‘I know, it’s just one big nightmare. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Don’t the pregnancy tests show from within a week of conception nowadays?’ said Trish.

‘Do they? I thought you had to wait two weeks. Feck, that’s what I told Denis. That’s how it used to be.’

‘That’s how it used to be sixteen years ago Aoife for God’s sake. You can tell after a week without going to the doctor now.’

‘I’m not sure I want to know for definite,’ I said. ‘I know that sounds stupid, but I don’t want to have to make any decisions.’

‘It’s not for you to make decisions,’ said Trish quietly. ‘It’s for that poor girl. How would her folks take it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘I don’t spend much time with them, the ole single conundrum thingy strikes again.’ Trish nodded her head. She knew only too well from my experience that being a single woman curtailed much of my old or even new possible social interactions. The fact that my ex-husband had left me, found a new woman, and then done a complete runner, skipping the country and any financial or parental obligations to the two boys was somehow viewed in certain circles as my fault: I must have driven him away. Until recently I’d had a plus-one but now I was in a limbo land of singledom again. Chris and I had parted while we took stock of our new relationship, ironically one that had also entailed babies, or rather Chris’ desire to have them and my refusal to go there again.

Babies were rearing their ugly heads all over the place and I wasn’t a happy camper.

I spoke with Denis afterwards. I explained that I was still living in the dark ages and that apparently the pregnancy tests could tell them now if Deirdre was pregnant or not.

‘Mam,’ he said. ‘Could you get one?’

I looked at him and numbly nodded, feeling as if even by buying the test I would be contributing to the likelihood of creating a conception; of making it real. Denis explained that during the school week it was hard for Deirdre to go into town and there was no way she was buying a test in the local chemist. The owner knew her parents. She would be killed.

‘Have you talked about what you might do if,’ and here I swallowed. ‘If she is pregnant?’ I said. Images tumbled out of the sky at me of my baby boy pushing a pram or rocking a child to sleep and I felt physically ill. It wasn’t that I was anti the idea of a baby, just not yet. Not my tousle-haired child.

‘No,’ he said miserably. ‘I don’t know how I feel to be honest.’ I started to cry. All my dreams for my child… and now this huge worry reared up its head. ‘I do love her, Mam, I know that, but a baby?’ The words hung in the air. For all that I worried about my son, for all that I had tried to lecture him on being safe, on taking precautions, this had still happened and had happened in way that was unpreventable. It wasn’t stupidity, it wasn’t a one night stand, my son and his girlfriend were in a committed if young relationship and if it held true, then they were unlucky, bloody unlucky.

‘Would she consider a=’ and here I struggled for a word that might be kinder than the act. In the end I settled for ‘termination’ but it wasn’t much better than abortion. I wasn’t sure how I felt myself. If she did want one then somehow we would have to travel to England, but what if she wanted it but her parents refused? How could I intervene in this other child’s life, even if it meant protecting her wishes? Oh my God, we had just witnessed the most painful debate in Ireland on bringing abortion into law, but only where the mother was at risk of death following the terrible and unnecessary death of a young Indian woman in Galway. The resulting outrage had forced the government to being into law limited abortion which included the threat of suicide based on a High Court case from thirty years ago. During the debate I’d had fixed liberal ideas. I was fully pro-choice and pro-women. I was disgusted that as a country we continued to say that abortion was a sensitive issue for us, whereas in fact it was a sensitive issue for every person, every community and every country. And while we argued about whether we would allow women to avail of abortions in Ireland, some five thousand still travelled every year to the UK where it was legal. We were effectively exporting our problems without any due regard to the trauma those women faced, having to make that decision and then having to travel at emotional and financial expense to another country.

The law, being a clumsy instrument in the working of human beings, was magnified by the innate complexity of our desires and wishes. But an inflexible law only made things worse. As I held my son who was now also crying, I grieved as much for the passing of his youth as for the unholy quandary we might find ourselves in should the egg prove to have been fertilised. For that was how I viewed it now, but I doubted I would be joined by Deirdre’s parents in this perspective. It was I, after all, who had been deputised to buy the pregnancy kit, not her mother.

Chapter Two

George came home from London exhausted and engaged. I had never seen him so happy. I suddenly realised that my brother, my lovely gorgeous brother, had been mourning for the past four years. I knew he hadn’t wanted to share before but I also felt like the most selfish sister in the world for not understanding his pain. George was at pains to assure me this wasn’t the case but I felt like a motor-mouth beside him and said as much.

‘Aoife, Aoife, it is how I am,’ he said. ‘I don’t find it easy to talk about stuff, despite the gay stereotypes. I’m more of the strong, silent type.’ Looking at his happy face I hugged him. I hoped that George never ran into O’Brien again, the cause of his heartache until now.

‘It is amazing how one man can do so much damage,’ I said. O’Brien had been my divorce solicitor and responsible for my almost losing the family home. But worse that than: it was he who had forced George’s fiancé to leave Ireland and him, perhaps forever, in dealings with building contractor John Birmingham. In forcing John to take dirty money, O’Brien had also threatened Rafe with deportation over an out of date work visa. George explained to me in sombre tones that O’Brien had done more than threaten John; he had sent round heavies to rough up Rafe so that he left Ireland with suspected broken ribs. ‘He threatened both families and to out me here in Ireland and more scarily Rafe in Egypt. His life would be in danger there.’

That explained Rafe’s departure and silence. Rafe was not only in fear of his own life in Egypt, but also of hurting George, whom he truly loved.

‘You two are like Little House on the Prairie,’ I said, quoting my pet hate. That program always involved one character sacrificing something—money, an opportunity, a body part—in favour of a loved one. It drove me nutty. Why couldn’t people have their cake and eat it? Maybe I was just plain greedy. Mind you, I certainly wasn’t eating my cake at the moment. If George was on cloud nine, I was in the low growling places where wild things roamed. Chris had still not come back to me. I was on tenterhooks to discover if we still had a future. Did he want a baby more than he wanted me? It was the longest four months of my life.

‘How spooky it was you working for Birmingham,’ said George. ‘Rafe and I would never have been reunited if John hadn’t revoked O’Brien’s blackmail. Truth is surely stranger than fiction.’

I agreed. The past six months had been a whirlwind of disasters and then, somehow, rabbits had started appearing out of hats. I’d nearly lost my house, but Chris had arranged for it to be raffled. We’d raised enough money and I did lose my house, only for Chris’ boss, Andreas, to hand it back to me. He had spent €50,000 winning the successful ticket, or fixing the draw, either way I didn’t care because he gave the deeds back to me in memory of his dead daughter. My eerie resemblance to her had secured my home. Then I was working with John Birmingham and when he discovered my outstanding and excessive legal fees from O’Brien, had confessed a dirty blackmail trick O’Brien had played years ago. And the final rabbit was George’s lover who had been caught as collateral damage in the deal. If you read it in a book, you’d never believe it. Life was definitely stranger than fiction.

‘It’s like Edgar Allan Poe and his novel about Arthur Gordon Pym,’ said George.

‘I don’t remember that one,’ I said. ‘I only remember the one about being locked in the coffin.’

‘It’s Poe’s only full length novel but it was dissed by the critics,’ said George. ‘Poe called it a silly book at the time although it was supposed to have inspired Herman Melville afterwards. In the novel, there were four survivors of a shipwreck in an open boat.

As they ran out of food, they drew lots and killed and ate the cabin boy called Richard Parker. Poe said it was based loosely on reality, and it was. But this reality hadn’t happened—yet. For some sixty years later a boat called the Mignonette floundered with only four survivors left in an open boat. Eventually the three senior members killed and ate the cabin boy, whose name was also Richard Parker.’

‘Spooky,’ I said.

‘Very,’ said George. ‘A distant relative of the cabin boy discovered the link. Can you imagine his reaction?’

‘And it’s not as though the book was popular so it led them on,’ I said. ‘But you hear of twins being separated at birth and then marrying women of the same name and having similar lives.’

‘Is that genetics rather than coincidence?’

‘I don’t know. I just think the gods were smiling on this occasion.’ I fell silent at that point. I was thinking of Deirdre and the results of the pregnancy test. I had given the test to Denis that morning and he was going to give it to her in school: we should know by this evening if she was pregnant or not. I hadn’t said it to George. He was too happy and until I knew for sure, I didn’t want to jinx anything. Please God let the gods continue to smile I thought. God and gods. I think I was praying to everything including the kitchen sink at this stage.

Chapter Three

We had lived to fight another day. Oh My God. The relief was palpable. I had been so conflicted in my own thoughts. It was easy to have an opinion when it didn’t impact your own life or that of your children’s. The thought of Deirdre having to make a decision regarding a possible baby had been horrible in the extreme. Even as a committed pro-choice woman, I had begun, in the few days since I had learnt of her possible predicament, to imagine my son a father and myself a grandmother. Both images were powerful and frightening. I did not want this now, but I wanted it in the future. How could each truth deny the other if divided just by time? If I liked peanut butter now, so too would I in the future, so how did this truth fall into pieces under the cleavage of time? I had no answers and this frightened me with its transience. Did time make mockers of all our beliefs; did truth shift in the cosmos? It was a sobering thought that all that might be required to dislodge a passion was the passage of time. It was unnerving to feel my beliefs were so tremulous.

Then I had grappled with secondary issues, such as who got to choose what was right or wrong. I genuinely believed that Deirdre had a right to make a decision about her own body, but it was scary how quickly I came to feel I was part of that decision making process. This was mad of course: my role was to support her, whatever she decided. But the heady range of emotions that had coursed through my own body, without the benefit of hormones, was enough to unsettle my well-being and make me doubt my judgement.

Deirdre was not pregnant, Denis was not to be a father and I was not to be grandmother. I wept when I heard the news, privately. I wept for the loss of my first grandchild even as I knew how stupid this emotion was. I tried to explain to Trish afterwards and she had an answer for me. ‘Do you remember the stories about John Wesley and Beethoven and even Christ?’ Puzzled I shook my head.

‘In the first case a preacher and his wife already had fourteen children and she became pregnant with another. They were living in extreme poverty, but if she aborted then John Wesley would never had been born. So too with Beethoven, his mother had a number of children before who had serious disabilities and a number even died, but if she had followed a logical train of thought, Beethoven would have never been born either. Finally, think about Mary—bare foot and pregnant in a harsh time.’

‘I am not anti-abortion,’ said Trish. ‘But we can only decide on our own terms. Not what society or the law suggests. At the end of the day, the woman has to decide. And it is one of the toughest decisions she has to make, regardless of the outcome. Abort or keep the child—neither is an easy path.’

I agreed. ‘I remember a wise woman, a minister of the Irish Utilitarian Church, said on radio: she said trust the mothers. Trust them.’ I sighed. I had come upfront and close with a conviction. I was staggered at how shaken I was in the experience. I was upset that we still did not have a process in Ireland to allow a woman to make that choice based on what was right for her and her possible baby, instead of what the distant legislators felt. If men could become pregnant, the whole world would be different. Trish sighed too.

‘I think if I had three disabled babies and was pregnant again, I’d feel obliged to give the last one the same chance as the others.’

‘You are ridiculous,’ I said. ‘You don’t have disabled children. and I disagree that you would make that choice. As for me, there is only so much of me to go around. I can parent as badly for one child as for many and to be honest, I’d rather keep it to a minimum.’

‘Chris hasn’t decided yet I take it,’ said Trish.

`‘No.’

Chapter Four

Itold George about Denis once the drama was over. He took a deep breath.

‘Thank the fuck,’ he said. ‘You certainly don’t need any babies in your life at the moment.’ I grimaced but he didn’t notice. He had no idea of the potential sword of Damocles hanging over my life. I was getting worried to be honest. Chris and I still communicated on a regular basis. We Facebooked, emailed, and texted, but we hadn’t spoken much. It was too painful. I wanted to grab him and ask him what he had decided but I didn’t want to hear the answer, not unless it was the right one. As long as he didn’t reply, it was certainly better than hearing a direct no. But as time passed I was more worried that his broody tendencies were dictating his heart and his mind. Dancing baby was no longer with me; guillotined baby was probably nearer the truth which is why I was co conflicted over Denis’ possible progeny.

I tried to explain that little ethical wobble to George. Prior to this, and come the revolution, he and I would have been manning the barricades shoulder to shoulder. He patted my shoulder at this point.

‘Little sis,’ he said. ‘You are confusing your emotions with the rights of women.’

‘Am I?’ I said. ‘Remember I’m the woman, George, you are the man.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘But I am just as much a feminist as you are, possible more so, since I don’t have so many mood swings.’ I thumped him, but not unkindly.

‘Remember that party at Marjorie’s,’ he said, ‘the one with all the doctors?’ I nodded but I couldn’t figure out the connection. Marjorie was a cousin of our mother’s, distant I think, and we had always compared her to the Marjorie played by Penelope Keith in the British TV sitcom, The Good Life. Both were members of the local am-dram group, had ridiculously posh accents and always dressed for dinner. Going to Marjorie’s soirees was anything but pleasant for us as children. Then, when we became adults, attending was even more painful. Everyone seemed like a stuffed shirt, the conversation was as dry as a big bag of dry things and we had nothing in common with the ageing guests.

‘The last party we both went to, about two years ago,’ said George, ‘remember abortion raised its ugly head again? A couple of the guests, both retired doctors, said it could be had in Ireland with the right kind of doctor.’

A chill went down my spine. How could I have forgotten? George and I had been incensed. Again, Ireland of the two rules: one for the rich and one for the poor. If you were well off then an accommodation could be sought with the right kind of doctor. Of course, you could only have the right kind of doctor if you were the right kind of person. I don’t remember how we did not head-butt the arrogant old goat. I think George had started to make the point strongly about the vulnerable in society yet again suffering when he saw Mum looking at us. He tempered his point so that he did not get into a fight. We left shortly afterwards and had not accepted, nor indeed received, invitations from Aunt Marjorie again. I think that was much to everyone’s relief. Now I understood what George was reminding me: we needed the freedom to make the decision. Everyone did. My crisis of belief was less to do with the natural law of universal equality of rights and more to do with how I wanted our own personal drama to work out. Without choice, we were less than citizens, we were serfs, and only those with money could circumnavigate the barriers.

I had continued to work with John Birmingham once a week. It was in fact one of my great pleasures to be in his company. He had been horrified to have been an innocent cog in the derailment of my brother’s great love and subsequently delighted to have been the architect of its phoenix-like revival. When he heard that George and Rafe were engaged he was delighted. He had the circumspect gladness of a man of advanced years: tolerant, but scant real understanding of homosexuality. I could see him grapple with possible questions for me, but either his total inability to comprehend the gay gene or just good manners made him close his mouth, beak-like, without having framed the question. It didn’t matter. He was warm in his regard for George and what he could not understand, he did not judge. For that I liked and admired him double. It was easy to be tolerant of different sexual orientations at my age, much harder for his. For him, Ireland had been a different place growing up, the emotional time in which we form our hardest prejudices. Over in the UK, from which we drew much of our earlier, pre-republican legislation, Queen Victoria had never signed lesbianism into illegality, while criminalising male homosexuality in the 1885 Act. There were various myths put forward as to why this was the case. Some argued that Victoria did not believe women could do such things; others, that it never crossed the legislators’ minds that women might be gay as well as men. The best reason I had read was that the male legislators were afraid that by making it illegal, it might put wicked thoughts into the heads of women. I found this amusing theory to be backed up, over a hundred years later, by a popular non-fiction book about women’s sexuality. Penned by the American journalist Daniel Bergner, his book seemed to argue that society had said that women were naturally and emotionally monogamous through a series of flawed empirical arguments which gained popularity and credence despite much evidence to the contrary. It appeared that monogamy was a cultural cage used to suppress women’s sexuality, but again that was driven by a male belief that sexuality and behaviour were mutually exclusive; as if by the mere process of desiring, all hope of polite manners would be distinguished in a lustful moment. That society as we knew it would collapse in an outrageous orgasm of pleasure. The very thought! Women, I decided, were much more pragmatic than history or some men, notably legislators, might allow.

The upshot of inherited Victorian law was that, while homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK in the 60’s, it was to take until the 90s in Ireland with Senator David Norris battling the case and armed with not one but two future Irish presidents, the yet-to-be-elected Mary Robinson and Mary McAlease. The fact that Norris subsequently ran for presidency unsuccessfully did not remove his great contribution to Irish society, that and his legendary Joycean scholarship.

For John Birmingham and men of his generation, he was in his fifties before the country of his birth decriminalised homosexuality. It was a wonder he had such capacity for acceptance. I loved him for loving where he had not encountered any real understanding before or even had close personal friendship with a gay man, let alone a gay woman.

He was my little oasis of calm that I entered every week. Together we uploaded photographs, tagged the pictures and wrote blog posts about conservatories. I realised that whereas before he had done work when I was not there, he had stopped doing that recently. And I believed that the reason was not indolence on his part but a kindness. He knew there was only enough work to warrant one day a week. If he worked in my absence there would be nothing for me to do when I arrived each week and the job would have dried up. A mixture of kindness on his part to ensure I still earned a few bob and a genuine pleasure in our combined company meant that the work continued as did our friendship.

At home Denis was putting his shoulder to the wheel. He had his mock exams in January and was working hard. He wanted to study engineering at either Trinity or