Marian Keyes exclusive extract: A is for alcohol...

By Helen Russell - Friday 24 August 2012

Marian Keyes ebook cover Marian Keyes

Marian Keyes is giving Marie Claire readers an exclusive taster of new ebook, Mammy Walsh's A-Z of the Walsh Family, every day this week. In our first extract, A is for alchohol, we meet the eldest Walsh sister, Claire

'There’s Claire, my eldest. She was born to myself and Mr Walsh in 1966, the Swinging Sixties, although we had no truck with ‘swinging’ in Ireland and nobody minded one little bit. Why would we ‘swing’ when we had praying? Also we were after getting our very own Irish television station, RTÉ, so there was plenty to keep us occupied. Not that we knew what ‘swinging’ actually entailed - wearing short dresses and false eyelashes, we suspected. We were delighted with Claire, of course, although I suspect Mr Walsh would have preferred a boy. She was a high-spirited child, a cheeky imp, if you want the God’s honest, and I found her hard to handle, always with the backchat and the opinions. But if I’d known what I’d be getting, further down the road with Helen, I’d have been on my knees every day, thanking God for my good little girl.
For a while it looked like Claire was going to do things my way – she went to university and got a degree, then she married an accountant. But then it all went ‘tits-up’ (is it okay for me to say that? I never know which slang is acceptable for a woman of my age and station to use and which isn’t.) Yes, everything went ‘tits-up’ for Claire, because her husband left her the day she gave birth to their first child but she’s a born survivor and she’ll tell you all about it herself in Watermelon.

A is for alcohol….
Anyway, when Claire was about 15, doesn’t she start this lark, secretly going from bottle to bottle, taking a little pour from each of them, until she’d filled up a lemonade bottle, then drinking the lot. The Lord alone knows what it tasted like, but she didn’t care. All that mattered was that she got inebriated. Or scuttered. Or stotious, mouldy, spannered, locked, poluthered, crucified, twisted... They say the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, but we Irish seem to have at least a hundred for the state of being intoxicated. Gee-eyed, that’s another one I’ve heard them use. So, without me knowing one screed of it, Claire was getting ‘gee-eyed’ on a regular basis, using my drink from my lovely drink’s cabinet and over time, the levels on my beautiful bottles started dropping. So what does the bould Claire do? She starts topping them up with water, that’s what she does. And kept topping them up with water. And kept on topping, until some bottles – most importantly the vodka – was 100% water. ..'

Watch Marian's introduction to Claire, below...

Mammy Walsh’s A-Z of the Walsh Family by Marian Keyes is available on kindle, in iTunes. We're running exclusive daily extracts from the e-book on marieclaire.co.uk/mariankeyes so you can read the latest from the Walsh family every day this week:

Day one - A is for alcohol...
Day two - Y is for yoghurt,,,
Day three - K is for knickers...
Day four - P is for padded envelopes...
Day five - V is for vajazzling...

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