Queen Bee by Ciara Geraghty

Author:Ciara Geraghty [Geraghty, Ciara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-12-16T17:00:00+00:00

but also:

b) I was afraid.

3 July, 4 a.m.

Symptoms: Paranoia

At least, if I have to be awake in the middle of the night, there were emails to read.

Dear Agatha,

I knew your mother! She’d be so proud of you.

MAM (tutting): Pride is one of the seven deadly sins.

I went through the menopause decades ago. Awful it was. And nobody said a word about it. It was a dirty secret like everything else back then. I remember the priest coming in after Noreen (my eldest) was born, to ‘church’ me. I asked him what it meant and he said it was to clean away my ‘impurities’ after childbirth.

I should have smacked him.

Or at the very least, squirted some breast milk on his face!

Anyway, sorry, I’m getting sidetracked.

I only wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed Menopause: The Movie. It makes me feel good every time I watch it. I sent it to my Evelyn (my youngest) in America. She’s in the thick of the menopause, raising twins on her own after that dose of a husband left her for an estate agent. They call them ‘realtors’ in America.

I know what I’d call him!!

Anyway, I’m hoping Evelyn will get some comfort from it.

Fond regards,

Eileen O’Dwyer

PS I can’t believe it’ll soon be your dear mother’s first anniversary. She was a formidable woman, Mrs Doyle. And she arranged the church flowers with such care. May the Lord have mercy on her soul.

MAM: I suppose she wasn’t the worst, Mrs O’Dwyer.

Oh, and an email from Samantha. The Guardian want me to write an article.

Downside: It’s about menopause.

Upside: They’ll pay!

Another little bit to add to the misery menopause fund.

It’ll involve research which – let’s face it – I haven’t been good at recently.

I need to research, then write about, menopause policies in the workplace.

I’ll take a wild guess and say there aren’t many of those.

Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Ha!

Still, something meaty to get stuck into. Already I can feel the rusty cogs in my brain start to turn. Perhaps the B vitamins are helping after all?

Unlike the magnesium the pharmacist promised would help me sleep.

I thought I should do something, since there’s no sign of Luke making good on his promise to learn to samba.

Although I’ve only taken one tablet so far. Maybe I should give it a minute.

I sent Carol a voice memo about the ‘cash-and-carry-cover-up’. It was too long to type.

4.02 a.m.

Carol responded with a voice memo of her own which she didn’t usually send, preferring the clarity of the written word.

She’s such a contracts lawyer.

It was strange to hear her voice. She was nonplussed and said – in an LA-lite accent, fuck sake, she’d only been there five minutes – that I was being paranoid.

I googled paranoia and learned that it’s a symptom of schizophrenia. A jaunty women’s health website cheerfully announced:

Menopausal schizophrenia is more common than you think!!

As if that statement wasn’t bad enough on its own without the in-your-face exclamation marks.

4.03 a.m.

Another voice note from Carol. She said it was completely normal for café owners to visit cash-and-carrys.

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