Fine Lines is a fictional series charting the implosion of 45-year old Tara Hewson’s world, and the curious bird that flaps up from the ashes…

Everything about M screamed New Beginnings. The surge of packages arriving in from Mr Porter and Asos; the 6 am scrambles to the gym; the teeth whitening retainers he hadn’t used in years.

But nothing boomed I’m So Excited by the Pointer Sisters more than his Domestics schedule. Pinned squarely to the fridge, it was designed around the new hours he would be keeping. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he would be home late and would not be partaking in dinner preparations or discussions pertaining to those nights.

It was a public service announcement. As default chef, he must have felt the need to formalise his future contributions and re-set expectations.

‘Are you and Dad divorcing?’ Suzy asked me as we gathered around the fridge door that morning.

‘No!’ Don’t be silly, why do you think that?’ I said.

‘You’re just both being really weird at the moment. Separate bedrooms, notes everywhere, Dad’s out late.’

‘He said he had a new business thing.’ Myrna said, tilting a giant box of Coco Pops over a small white bowl

The girls were 14 and 16, old enough to pick up on shifts in their immediate landscape but too self-involved to properly explore the reality yet.

‘If you guys do split up.’ Suzy went on. ‘Do we get money or something?’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘Like a payout, hush money?’

‘No! Why would you get hush money from your parents?’

‘Not hush money but you know, compensation?’

‘That would be so sweet.’ Myrna said before I could answer. ‘’We could buy a flat together and get TikTok famous.’

And then they were dancing already, spaghetti straps and belly buttons in oversized track bottoms, popping and grinding in sync to 15 seconds of an imaginary beat.

Three of Flavia’s 30-day challenge activities had already involved getting naked and we were only 13 days in by then.

Soon after the swim, she drove us to ‘Ireland’s only Hammam’ in Wicklow, which, it turns out, was a baldly false claim. Flavia described the traditional Turkish bathing ritual in detail on the way down – the pre-treatment steam room, nourishing body masks on hot marble slabs, the sloughing of dead skin and sense of magnificent renewal.

But she had never been to Shanahan’s ‘Adults Only’ Spa before. Kathy, who ran the show, was a busy woman with no time for pre-game banter. Once stripped, we were grated like two cheap hunks of rubbery cheddar and power-hosed in an out-building that appeared to be still in use as a GAA club changing room.

Our journey home was silent and reflective.

A Kundalini yoga session was next at our local studio. I didn’t practice yoga but there was some big deal guru guy visiting and Flavia signed us up. He talked a lot about the ecstatic state of spiritual ecstasy he strives to achieve by controlling his contrary energies. Rather than allowing himself to orgasm, for example, he directs that powerful sexual energy up his spine so it culminates in a spiritual union with the Divine. Flavia threw me a thumbs down at that revelation.

He looked about 70 years old but I suspected he was 119 or some record-beating age.

He was in fact 59, according to his assistant, who also told me that I would benefit from a regular Mirror Gazing practice as I was notably uncomfortable in my own body. This, she said, involved sitting (or standing) daily with my naked body and connecting with my truest self.

‘Start with: I see you; you’re beautiful; I love you.’ She said. ‘And then create your own affirmations, speak lovingly to every crease and fold of your body.’

And so, while I hovered by the crack in my curtains every Tuesday and Thursday night, waiting for M to come home so I could secretly scan him for clues of his new life, I practised my affirmations.

It was a twisted ritual. I had never hated my body but since having the girls, I had never really looked at it. It didn’t disgust me but it also didn’t spark joy. And now I was looking at it with new eyes. Now I wondered who might find this body attractive, who might deem it fuckable?

‘If you don’t want to have sex with yourself, no-one will want to have sex with you.’ Flavia had said.

But instead of heaping praise on my exposed flesh, I made fun of it. I picked and pinched at sagging knees and nipples pointing floorward, white-twerking my way only to the discovery of a suspect mole on my coccyx.

I’d never taken time off work before on personal grounds but I knew I wasn’t strong enough to keep it together in front of Susan, so I called in sick.

The creative ad agency I worked for, RAGE, had had a tough couple of years and we’d got used to announcements of departmental closures, redundancies and reconfigurations of teams. The industry was globalising and it was becoming harder to justify the cost of locally produced TV, digital and print creative when markets were homogenising and big brands were looking for inoffensive, catch-all solutions.

So it probably wasn’t the best time to have a personal crisis, to take 5 whole days off work when I rarely took my full holiday allocation on a normal year. And 5 days was the guts of 2 weeks MIA as I was also a ‘skiving part-timer,’ as Susan liked to goad.

I turned up on the Friday of the second week braced for confrontation.

Alex, one of the strategic ad planners, stuck his head out of a glass conference pod just as I got to my desk.

‘Hey Tara, would you mind joining us for a second, we need your head.’ He said.

‘Sure.’ I said, following him in.

A mix of planners, designers and copy-writers sat squished around a small oval table.

‘So we have this new U&P pitch for incontinence pads, women over 40, yeah?’ Alex said to me.

‘Okay.’ I said.

‘And we’ve agreed on the storyboard, a sweet little sequence but thought we should run it by you.’ He said, flicking through the proposed story frames on his laptop. ‘But I’m not on that account?’ I said.
‘‘Yeah, but we wanted to ask you because you’re….’ He stalled.

‘A woman over forty?’ I said.

‘Totally.’

‘Who may or may not have experienced incontinence?’ I said.

They all laughed into their buttoned-up aertex’s. Not one of them was thirty yet.

‘Go on then.’ I said.

‘Okay, so we thought we’d open with a woman on the beach chasing her granddaughter around.’ Alex said

‘Wow, okay, how old is she?’ I said.

‘Em, I guess we’re thinking 45, 47...’ He said.

‘Uh-huh.’ I said, totting up the biological maths.

‘Suddenly she stops running after the kid because she can feel that she’s had a little accident.’

He used air quotes for ‘accident’ and flashed up some stock imagery of silver-haired women on a beach.

‘Then she takes her granddaughter home because she’s obviously wet herself and the kid is all like: granny, come and play on the trampoline with me.’ He said, in a baby voice.

‘And granny is thinking, ‘unless you want me to activate the 3 Arena sprinkler system, kid, I’m sitting this one out. Amirite?’ I said, not one of them catching my open fury and derision.

‘And so, her daughter then comes out of the house.’ He continued. ‘And discreetly hands granny a pack of InCo pads. Granny heads off to the jacks, slips one in, does what she has to do and the final shot is of her bouncing like a mad thing on the trampoline, happy out, not an absolute bother on her.’

Alex wrapped up with a virtual mic drop and they all turned to look at me.

‘Okay, so I’m 45, so this should be speaking to me, right?’ I said. ‘This silver-haired woman in beige linen cut-offs, with a wardrobe full of v-neck t-shirts?’

‘She’s just a general representation.’ Alex said.

‘She doesn’t represent anyone, Alex. No-one is this person at 45. Some women are having their first babies at 45, not grandchildren. Between 30 and 40% of people over 40 in this country are either single, separated or widowed...’ I said. ‘She is nobody, ever. And if she was a 45-year-old grandmother she’d be way cooler than that.’

‘We could make her a widow actually?’ The copy-writer said. ‘There’s no grandpa in the picture.’

‘Fucking hell.’ I said. The gormless line-up of bum fluff and ego was all too much. I backed out of the room, slamming directly into Susan.

‘Christ has risen!’ she said, recoiling from me. ‘Can I talk to you?’

I followed her into her glass box office.

‘Sit.’ She said.

Susan was the MD. It was well known that Susan didn’t feel feelings. I’d filled out every Psychopathic Test I could find on her behalf and she always scored highly, well over the baseline of ‘probably a psychopath.’

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ She said.

‘I’ve had a personal situation….’ I said.

‘For two weeks? It better involve the death of someone in your own home.’ She sucked on her platinum vape, barely releasing smoke from her nostrils.

‘Kind of.’ I said.

I could tell that she was trying to scowl. Botox had immobilised her face and that’s how she liked it. Fresh and natural were not in her vocabulary. She didn’t see the point of opting for baby doses every couple of months when she could have one big hit with a heavy-handed practitioner and be crack-free for seasons.

‘What’s up with you anyway?’ She said. ‘You don’t look right.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘You’re looking very menopause-y or something.’

‘What’s menopause-y?’ I asked.

‘Don’t ask me to spell it out, Tara! You’ve no colour in your face, the skin on your jaw is loose and jowly, I can practically see the collagen seeping out of your body. You just look old.’

‘Thank you for literally spelling it out.’ I said, getting up to leave.

‘Okay, okay. I’m just saying, you’re lucky to have a job here at your age, don’t screw it up. So now, you can do something for me.’

‘What?’

‘I want you to pretend to be my friend next Thursday night.’ She said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve got a date with a super hot Argentinian guy and he doesn’t speak English. I don’t speak Spanish, and you do. So you can be our interpreter or whatever. Plus he’s bringing his friend or cousin, I can’t remember.

‘Also.’ She says before I can answer. ‘I want you to get rid of that dyslexic girl at reception.’

‘But…’

‘I don’t care how you do it, I just don’t want HR on my back again.’

FMAL.

I’ve finally been reduced to an acronym.

Rhona McAuliffe, June 2020.