We present an extract from Best Friends, the new novel by by Andrew Meehan, the author of One Star Awake and The Mystery Of Love.
June cleans houses. Ray is a janitor at the public tennis courts in Dun Laoghaire. He's not romantic material; she’s not even friend material. When it comes to learning how to be with other people at the age of 70 plus, they are unlikely companions – even more unlikely friends...
June goes to bed early.
The machinery you hear in the night, all the little rumbles that reach the heart, at her age everything ends up there. When it gets too much all you can do is get up again.
She has made a little pact with herself.
If it's a nice day, get out in it.
But every week that passes, this village becomes far too five- star in itself. Some of the houses on the seafront are so smartened up that they look refrigerated, they’ve gotten rid of all the seaweed smells and the sewage smells, anything that sends out the wrong information. June is the wrong information.
She makes her way up the most immaculate driveway—the gravel is like something you’d put on ice- cream, the windows have a Dracula sheen to them—and she wants to know what it is like for rich people to be way they are, which is what? Strange. But nothing in life is as straightforward as it should be.
June Wylie’s seventy- four years old and going door to door looking for jam jars for her honey.
June can be a funny one, with all its scattered light and the stretching of the days. And this has been a very funny June, not even midsummer and the daisies are flopping,
it’s criminal how even the roses are too tired to open up.
Too much effort required.
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Listen: Andrew Meehan talks Best Friends on RTÉ Arena
The bay first thing this morning was looking divine, and June would really like this June to be a bit less divine. A bit less deluxe. She’d like everything to be a bit more low- key.
June needs June to be little less and little more.
She’d like not to be in these socks, woollen and speaking of winter, she’d like to have her legs out, as if it’s 1956 and she’s been climbing down from the most ancient oak tree in Helen’s Bay, and as if it’s 1977 and she’s been drinking bottles of export Guinness on the Regent’s canal, and as if it’s 2002 and she can’t get out of bed (the bad memories you can’t remember any more, they’re the worst), none of which has much bearing on the way things have been lately, which is not very bare legs- like at all.
Young is anyone under the age of June’s age, and the young woman who answers the door is as refrigerated as her house.
—Just wondering if you have any empty jars? June says.
—Why would I have jars? the young woman says.
—Jam jars.
—Why would I have jam?
The woman is affronted at the very mention of anything containing sugar. And why would she have jam, indeed? For all June knows, this woman might have strong feelings on the subject.
For all June knows, this might be a bad time, jam- wise, life- wise. For all June knows this woman has three ex-husbands, too.
The woman starts padding around the place like she’s Princess Caroline of Monaco. It’s an open- plan semi, June’s cleaned plenty of those, and she is, of course, thinking of the price of everything—five grand couches, cutlery to put yours to shame—and the fact that cleaning such nice houses reminds you of what’s missing in your own.
The air husband no. 2 took with him when he went away.
The money she never got from husband no. 3.
The butter dish husband no. 1 threw against the wall on the 10th of February 1972.
The woman returns with a twenty folded into quarters.
—You don’t have to ask for jam jars, she says.
—They’re for my bees, June says, taking the money.
In all ways, except the having of two beehives, June Wylie has nothing much to show for her life. But now, when all she wanted was a few jam jars, she is twenty euro up.
—You keep bees? Where?
—In hives, June says.
—Hives, where?
—At my house, June says. And I always need jars.
—Is it the season?
It’s the season, sure enough. Plenty of flowers, a nice bit of rain, the bee populace keen for work. But June knows what the woman is getting at. No one with that accent has the land for hives.
—Are you nearby? Tessa says. I’m Tessa by the way.
—In the terrace behind the national school, June says.
—I’ll have to take a walk past.
—Just to check that I have the bees?
It takes one to know one, and this Tessa one lives here alone. Those flowers are too simple to have been bought by anyone else. And that make- up is for her own amusement. Who gets a hairdo and puts on yoga pants? But June doesn’t think Tessa always lived here like this. A view of the sea is not something you ever plan on stomaching alone.
—You’re a fascinating creature, Tessa says. Who are you? Tell me.
How do you begin to describe yourself; how can you describe a person? June has bees but she’s not a beekeeper, she doesn’t know other people who have bees, you’re not going to see her at any fêtes.
She’s not the type of woman you’d look twice at. Once upon a time she had herself down for Chrissie Hynde, but punks get old, and some punks can’t afford the upkeep, and some punks can’t be arsed with it. June put it down to the hairdressers being closed since Covid, but the hairdressers are back open a good while now.
June cleans houses; there are bleach burns up her arms, the elastic is gone in her trousers. It’s her eyesight, it’s her bones, she has a new hip, she has two of them.
She’s from the old days, when things were better, and they weren’t as good.
She smokes, she has bad breath, she sleeps in, she’s been told she’s hard, and she is hard, and she’s so soft that she cries at cartoons seen through someone’s living room window.
She’s the grass that needs cut. She’s yesterday’s eyeliner today. She’s the skirt tucked into tights, the phone number with the digit left off. She’s margarine, tap water and a packed lunch, she’s a bad mattress, she is borrowed Wi- Fi, she is black nights. She can’t even say who she is, she’s nothing to speak of.
Best Friends is published by Muswell Press
