Claim
By: Fiona Ennis
In the tiny room that’s used as a staff canteen in Halden Insurance, you take two Ryvita out for your lunch, snap one in half, then put the bigger half back in your lunchbox. Maura licks the egg mayonnaise that’s spilling out of her sandwich as she watches you slice a tomato. She’ll probably make some comment about you being too thin again. Her dark blonde fringe, sprayed to the last, stands up straight over her forehead, and you can see where the teeth of the comb were pulled through the strands. The rest of her hair is backcombed. She thinks she looks like one of the Bangles or something. The last time she gave you a lift home when it was raining, she played ‘Manic Monday’ and then fast-forwarded the tape to ‘Walk like an Egyptian’, doing the hand actions when she stopped at the traffic lights. Seán, your boss, asked her last week to tone down the hair a bit, look more professional when she’s talking to clients, not that her hair bothered him as such, he’d said, but she had to think of the company image. Most days she slicks her hair back with that wet look gel, but not today, as she’s heading out for drinks after work. Not that he’ll say anything. She’ll probably end up in Club Tempo after. It’s free in for women on Thursdays. Ladies’ Night. She’ll be dying in the morning again.
The kettle shudders on the countertop and clicks just as Seán walks in. His jacket is hanging off him. You don’t know why he always carries a copy of The Irish Times to the canteen each day. He never ends up reading it.
He nods at you, ‘The usual?’
‘Yep. Thanks.’
He puts a teaspoon of coffee into the red mug and another into his special mug.
Maura points a frosted pink nail at your plate. ‘Don’t know how you can be full on one and a half Ryvita. Still, it’s a quarter more than you had yesterday, isn’t it, Niamh? And Seán, since you’re asking, I’ll have a cuppa too.’
He opens the box of tea and throws a bag in the yellow mug with the chip off the side. ‘Sure, that’s why she’s so lovely and thin, isn’t it?’
Maura raises her tadpole eyebrows.
He smiles at you, and his eyes graze over your legs. You pull at your pencil skirt a bit.
Then he says, ‘Did you know Greta Garbo used to insure her legs for millions?’
Maura puts down the crust of her sandwich and takes out a Penguin bar. ‘Yeah, I heard Tina Turner does that. Dunno if it’s true. Imagine if we got a call from someone around here asking for that?’
He brings over the coffee. When Maura looks at him, he goes back for her tea.
As he sits down beside you, you move your chair and say, ‘Imagine the actuaries working out that one?’
He laughs. ‘Ah, I don’t think the premiums would be too high somehow.’
Maura is in the bathroom, fixing up her makeup before she hits the pub. The office phone rings. It’s ten to five. Typical. This had better not hold you up. Your stomach is growling, and you have to do your aerobics video before dinner.
You say, ‘Hello, Halden Insurance. Niamh speaking. How may I help you?’
A woman’s voice says, ‘Ah, Niamh. Glad I got you before closing. It’s Margaret, the bishop’s secretary.’
‘What can I do for you, Margaret?’ The diocese is a huge account. This could take ages.
‘Well, we’re trying to insure against all sorts of risks. There are a lot of people against the Church these days.’
‘Dreadful, isn’t it?’ You’re glad she doesn’t know you voted in favor of legalizing divorce last year, not that the referendum passed. Seán had told Maura not to be attending those pro-divorce protests in town, in case it got back. He doesn’t know she headed off on the bus to that rally in Dublin, bringing all the flyers with her that she’d copied on the office machine.
Margaret’s voice is barely loud enough to hear. ‘People are making all sorts of allegations against a few of the priests.’
‘Imagine, after they’ve given up their lives for the Church.’
‘We’ll have to take out some unusual cover, in the interests of the diocese, and the priests too, of course.’
‘Right. What kind of policy, Margaret?’ Your shoe is chafing your right heel, and you slip your shoe off and dangle it from your toes.
‘One that protects the diocese against liability arising from sexual abuse of children by priests.’
‘Excuse me?’ Your shoe falls to the floor.
‘Is there a problem?’
‘No, no, of course not.’
You knock on Seán’s office door. It’s after five, but he always works late.
‘Come in.’ He’s sitting at his desk and smiles when you enter. ‘Shouldn’t you have gone home by now? I’m working you too hard.’
‘Pay rise?’
He lets out a breath through his teeth. ‘Yeah, right. Feels like the economy is never going to pick up.’
‘I need to talk to you about something.’
He indicates for you to take a seat, then sits back in his chair and rakes his fingers through his hair.
You sit and pull your skirt over your knees. ‘I just got a call from Margaret, the bishop’s secretary.’
‘Oh yeah?’
How are you going to put this? ‘She was inquiring about a policy to insure the diocese against liability for sexual abuse of children by priests.’
‘What’s that now?’ He sits forward and puts his hands on the desk.
‘A policy to protect against liability for sex abuse of children by priests.’
‘Right, right.’ He rubs his forehead.
‘So, what do we do?’
‘Do?’
‘Like report it?’
He taps his pen on the desk, then stares at it for a moment. ‘No, we won’t be doing that.’
‘They could be near kids.’
‘Niamh, we protect against liability. Just because we insure a house against fire, doesn’t mean the house will go on fire. This is just protection in case claims are made. Insurance 101.’
‘You don’t believe that.’
‘I do. Anyway, this is confidential. You’re not to mention it to anyone.’
He cannot be serious.
He says, ‘I mean it, Niamh.’
‘I have to.’
His neck is mottled. ‘You can’t cast aspersions on people’s characters, least of all on our clients. You’d better keep it to yourself.’ Then he opens a desk drawer. ‘I’ve a stack of CVs here from girls just like you. You’d have no prospects on the dole queue. You know yourself factories are closing up and down the country.’
You watch as he closes the drawer. It feels like it happens so slowly.
Then he looks at you, like really looks at you. ‘Niamh, I don’t want to lose you. Just do the paperwork tomorrow; there’s a good girl. But keep any documents relating to it out of Maura’s sight. You know what she’s like.’
You get up from the chair and close the door behind you.
After the forty-minute walk home from work, you let yourself into your bedsit. You hate waking up in the same room as your fridge and TV, and the rent is pretty high considering the flowery wallpaper is peeling, and the carpet is lifting away from the skirting board. A loud grumble comes from your stomach, but you’ve always been like that, wanting to eat because something’s eating you. You preheat the oven, change into your t-shirt and tracksuit pants and rewind your Jane Fonda video. This should take your mind off things. By the time the video is over, your dinner should be ready. You take a Lean Cuisine Sweet and Sour Chicken out of the freezer. At least you don’t need a microwave for this flavor, or for the Chicken Fried Rice one, even though the rice sometimes gets hard in the oven and tastes like little pellets. Still, at least you know what’s in them: 300 calories, so two thirds of it today = 200 calories. You’ve learned not to leave the third you don’t want on your plate. Well, it’s not that you don’t want it, but you always put it in the bin before you even sit down. You peel off the film, pop it out of the container and put it in the oven. Then you move the tiny table and chair nearer your bed so you can do your workout.
You do your waist-whittlers, and even though you’re sweating and trying to concentrate on the exercises, you keep replaying that conversation with Seán. Maura would have stood up to him. And she would have done something already. Why are you so useless? Utterly useless. You put your mat on the carpet to do your inner thigh exercises. You hate these. You do two, then you stop doing them and just lie there, even though Jane is being really encouraging on the TV. You stare at the big brown stain on the ceiling, just near the light, then get up and turn off the video, not even noting where you were on the tape. You’ve never stopped it partway through before.
When your dinner is ready you sit down, don’t even bother scraping off the third you don’t usually eat. You plow through it, rather than your usual slow mouthfuls, and when you’ve finished, you can feel it just sit there. You go into your bathroom, bend over the toilet bowl and retch. It’s been a long time since you’ve done this, you’ve been so good at not doing it, so good at controlling everything that goes in so that you don’t have to do this anymore, but your body remembers what to do. You don’t even need to stick two fingers in your throat, like you used to when you started doing this back when you were twelve. The food just comes up your throat and plops out, the curry, mixed with acid, burning your throat. Lumps of chicken come up too. Grains of rice float in the bottom of the bowl. When no more will come up, you sit on the lino in front of the sink, crying, your arms around your legs. Not this again. You’ve been so good for so long. You can’t go back to this.
* * *
Every day, while you sat on the primary school bus, staring at the fields go by, Leanne from your class would get onto you again about being fat, calling you Titanic and stuff, and who was she to talk? As if she had the perfect body or something. The last time she fell out with her two best friends, Neasa and Cara, they told everyone she stuffed her bra with tissues. Not that they were all that either: Cara had one blue eye and one brown eye, and Neasa’s hair was always greasy. They weren’t too bad to you though, didn’t really call you names, but they laughed along with Leanne just the same. The day before you’d started making yourself sick after eating, Leanne had sat behind you on the bus and called you names, while you’d stared at the gloop in the corner of the black rubber around the window. David Nolan, who you had fancied all year, wasn’t in the backseat where he usually sat. You’d got a seat near the front, and David had sat opposite and smiled at you. You hadn’t imagined that. He’d been looking at you in class for the past few weeks, but on the bus that day, when Leanne started calling you Fatso really loudly, he’d got up and walked to the backseat, to the rest of the cool sixth class crowd, who picked old cigarette butts off the ground that were there from the town runs and smoked them.
Your cheeks were burning. You didn’t want to go on like this anymore, wearing an enormous skirt with an elasticated waist. Your mum was always on at you about your weight, and even your auntie, who usually nudged her to stop, kept telling you how she had lost loads of weight by walking every day, so you decided to get off the bus early and walk a good part of the way home. Alan, the bus driver, could drop you at the sign that said three miles to your townland. That would be a good start. Your stop was the last one on the journey home every day. Leanne’s stop was second last, and her house looked rundown. Her mum had run off with someone; everyone knew that, even though she said her mum was modeling in Paris. Every day, for the last part of the journey, when everyone except you and Leanne had left the bus, Alan, the driver, asked her to sit in the front seat and chat to him. He was in his thirties, which seemed ancient back then. He was always kind to you though.
When you reached the sign for your townland, before he’d called Leanne up to talk to him, you’d said, ‘Can you let me off here?’
He’d said, ‘Why?’
‘I want the exercise.’
‘Won’t your mum be worried about you?’
‘She won’t be home until half five anyway.’
He’d stopped the bus and opened the door. ‘Pop out so. And Niamh, don’t let that name-calling get to you. They’re only jealous because you’ve a pretty face.’
You’d looked at your feet as you’d walked down the steps. ‘Thanks.’
The bus had lurched forward and drove out the road where there were no houses for ages. You’d adjusted your schoolbag on your back. It was a pity you hadn’t had P.E. that day; you would have had your runners with you instead of your hard patent shoes.
The next morning when you got off the bus, Neasa and Cara stopped you. Leanne was standing over by the school gate. They nodded at you to wait with them until everyone else had gone. Class wouldn’t start for another fifteen minutes.
Neasa said, ‘We need you to come with us to Mrs. Crawford and tell her what that bus driver has been doing.’
You put your schoolbag on the ground for a minute. Your shoulders still hurt from carrying it the day before. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Leanne says he’s always looking at her and getting her to come up and talk to him after everyone has gone. Yesterday, after you got off the bus early, he did stuff to her.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
Neasa moved a bit nearer. ‘He was touching her.’
You looked over at Leanne, leaning against the gate. ‘She’s lying.’
Cara said, ‘What?’
‘He’s never called her up to talk to him. And I didn’t get off the bus early. Why would I do that?’
Neasa pushed her fringe back from her face. ‘Why would she lie?’
‘She stuffs her bra with tissues. And she said her mum is a model in Paris. How can you believe a word she says?’
They looked over at her, then at each other.
Neasa said, ‘Glad we talked to you. We could have got in a heap of trouble over this.’ Then she walked up to Leanne and kicked some gravel at her. ‘You’re a dirty liar.’
That evening, even though you’d brought your runners with you, you didn’t get off the bus early to walk home. But after everyone else had gone, you watched how Alan looked at Leanne in the mirror, and felt guilt wriggle its way through you and take hold. That evening after your mum served you chicken and veg, you went to the bathroom and put your fingers down your throat.
* * *
It’s after lunch, and Maura has perked up a bit. She was hungover all morning and put her head down on her desk a few times, but after a Tayto sandwich and some Fanta, she’s coming back to herself.
Seán’s door is closed, but she keeps her voice low. ‘I’m never drinking again. I mean it this time.’
You say, ‘Yeah, right.’
‘Anyway, what’s up with himself? He barely said a word at lunchtime, not that I’m complaining.’
‘Dunno.’ You’ve finished working on the policy for Margaret, and the documents are in an envelope on your desk, ready to post, but you can’t bring yourself to seal the envelope.
Maura looks at you. ‘You’re very quiet today. Why’d you stay on after I left at five? You’re usually out of here like a hot snot.’
‘Just had to talk to him about something.’
She comes over. ‘Hope he didn’t try it on. I’ve seen the way he gawps at you. I’m here if you want to tell me anything.’
You look at her for what feels like a whole minute. Then you pick up the envelope containing the policy and feel your fingers draw out the documents.
‘I mean it,’ she says. ‘I can stand up to him.’
You slide the documents back in and put the envelope down. ‘No, everything’s okay, Maura.’
‘You don’t look like it is.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m fine. Thanks though.’
‘If you’re sure.’ She goes back to her desk. ‘I could do with some air. I’m off to post some documents. Have you got anything to go there?’
‘Yep.’
You seal the envelope, hand it to her, and she walks out the door. You almost run after her, but instead, you go to the bathroom, pressing your forehead against the door. Then you lean over the toilet, and when you vomit, only a small piece of Ryvita comes up. It won’t flush away.
* * *
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