Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [4]
While I was having trouble getting it on, Mum and Dad were having more success. They’d only ever planned and budgeted on having two children, but that’s not how things panned out. One quiet night when I was about eleven and on a sleepover (I never found out why my mother thought it necessary to reveal this particular detail - did they never have sex when I was in the house?), Mum had one too many Tia Marias and milk, Dad got amorous, and they found a few weeks later, to their equal surprise and dismay, that Mum was expecting. That was Emma of course, Mum and Dad’s little ‘afterthought’.
If my little sister has ever sensed she was a mistake she’s never let on. If a baby could exit the womb twirling a cane and doing high kicks to music, that would have been Emma. She beamed at us all at age four weeks and that smile has rarely left her face since. From the moment she could walk, she danced and sang and entertained and charmed her way through childhood. We all adored and indulged her from day one and I don’t think any of us could imagine life without her. She’s twenty-three now - a grey-eyed, dark-blonde beauty managing her own thriving beauty therapy business - but she’s not planning on relinquishing her baby of the family status anytime soon; on the contrary she continues to milk it for all it’s worth.
My career path has been an interesting one. It started in customary fashion with lust, specifically lust for Adam Donaldson, my Year 11 biology teacher. Imagine the frisson of excitement that spread throughout our all girls’ school, when Mr Donaldson, the new science teacher, turned out to be not another fifty-something with dandruff and a tendency to wear long socks and polyester shorts but a tall, muscular, twenty-five year old with hazel eyes and honey-brown curls. Up until that time science had - apart from the occasional opportunity to make rotten egg gas and fill Emily Wilson’s pencil case with copper sulphate solution - been no more interesting to me than any other subject, but Mr Donaldson’s arrival sparked a fascination with all things biological.
Of course, I had competition. A couple of the more adventurous girls tried to get his attention by sitting in the front row and spreading their legs as wide as possible, perhaps offering him some more practical experience with the female human reproductive system. I was not that confident about the attractiveness of my inner thighs, and attempted to gain his notice by studying hard and becoming his best student. If ever you wanted to know anything about photosynthesis or the life cycle of the mosquito, I was your girl. This strategy did work to some extent. I’d flush with pride (or was it oestrogen?) when he’d single me out for praise in front of the other girls.
Unfortunately, just before I was about to sit my final exams and looking forward to the time when no pesky teacher-pupil ethics would stand between me and my chosen one, I received the crushing news that he had become engaged to some horrible, undeserving cow. I sobbed for days. But by this time my study path was set and early next year I headed, broken-hearted, to university to study for a Bachelor of Science.
It’s curious, reflecting back, but I never seriously considered whether science was what I really wanted to do. Proper scientific research requires patience and meticulous attention to detail, not qualities I have in abundance. I was probably too busy to think about these questions, what with commuting to and from university, attending lectures, working as a waitress at our local pizza restaurant to make ends meet, studying and occasional partying (or more accurately partying and occasional studying). I was a competent student, however, and did particularly well at pharmacology (the