‘Is this really where you want it, Mrs Fitzgerald?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can swing it around to the side if that would make it easier for you to run a water pipe from the kitchen.’ He paused. ‘I mean, you have a water supply here, don’t you?’
‘There used to be one decades ago.’
‘How will you survive without water?’
This man thinks that I’m demented, Eva thought, a lost old bird who should be kept in a cage. ‘Survival is the one thing I am good at. The poor cats will be terrified. You might lift down their baskets.’
The driver went to say something and then changed his mind. He released the three cats who ran around the lawn in great circles after their confinement. The oldest of them, Queensly, glared reproachfully at Eva and refused to let the old woman come near. The driver put concrete blocks in place to stabilise the mobile home, and Eva climbed inside. Her books had been packed into boxes for the move, with the crockery carefully wrapped up. The cats would be starving, and she needed to feed them. The responsibility for their care was the only thing that kept her going. She called their names at the door, but they refused to respond, still having not forgiven her. The noise of the spoon against their bowl brought them scurrying in, however, ill-tempered after their long confinement. They pushed each other greedily aside as they ate. Dusk had settled in. She went out to the driver who was putting down additional concrete blocks to serve as steps up to her door. He would be anxious to get his truck back down the avenue before all daylight was gone.
‘You’ve a long journey ahead,’ she said.
‘Sure haven’t I the radio for company.’ He looked around him at the darkening trees. ‘This is a lonely spot. Is there anything more I can do for you, Ma’am?’
‘No. You’ve been really kind.’
‘Does anyone know you’re here? You’re very isolated in this wood. In Wexford they said that you were some class of artist, or was it a writer? Nobody seemed quite sure.’
‘I was never quite sure myself.’
The man opened the cab door and climbed up. ‘Whatever you are, Ma’am, I wish you happiness.’
‘Thank you.’
He switched on his headlights, slammed the door and drove off. The gathering dusk seemed more pronounced after he was gone. Eva re-entered the freezing mobile home, suddenly nervous on her own. It felt ridiculous to feel anxious in this place that had once been home. But she had always slept in the house, with candles and log fires lighting up familiar rooms. It was too dangerous to enter any part of the old house now except the basement. Eva had lost count of the number of fallen trees that had smashed onto the roof over the years. Last spring she had explored the basement with her granddaughter, climbing up the back stairs to peer towards the rooms where Hazel and Francis had run as children, unsure if the floor would still take their weight. On that trip she had discovered that intruders had torn out the last Georgian fireplace with its black marble surround. When dragging it across the front hall the floorboards had collapsed, plunging the heavy fireplace down into the wine cellar below, which was haunted by the ghost of a former butler. Traces of blood had suggested that at least one intruder had been injured, though since the Troubles broke out again in the North you were never sure what traces of blood in a remote location signified.
Staring now at the dark ruin, Eva questioned the wisdom of returning to a place with so many ghosts. An anonymous pension back in Morocco or Spain might have been better, somewhere warm for her arthritis and her soul. But she lacked the will to start travelling again. Finding some candles in a packing case she struck a match. It spluttered out, and she had to close the caravan door before a match would stay aflame long enough to light two candles. Placing them on the low table, she sat back on the window seat, which she still thought of as Alex’s bed. It was Alex who had looked around the mobile home in delight on her first visit and christened it ‘The Ark’. It didn’t feel like an ark now, but the walls would look better when Eva’s pictures were re-hung, the shelves less bare when the old books were unpacked. Eva understood the routine of moving better than anyone, because she had spent so much of her life doing so.
It would be time enough to start unpacking tomorrow. The clock had not been wound for days, but she knew it was only around half five. There seemed nothing else to do except get into her bed fully dressed and hope not to wake until morning. Eva ate some carob chocolate, because she felt that she ought to. Then she opened the skylight to allow the cats to come and go. They would be disorientated but would enjoy exploring the crumbling house to the consternation of mice who had found refuge there. The caravan felt even icier with the skylight open, but – apart from her concern about what might happen to the cats – Eva hardly cared whether she was found frozen to death here in the morning.
This thought sounded self-pitying and was therefore wrong. As a young woman she remembered reading a D. H. Lawrence poem about how a bird could fall dead from hunger without having ever felt one moment of self-pity. But such stoicism was easy in print. In the past two months Eva had found that the solace of books had failed her. Even Martin Buber’s great theological study, I and Thou, brought none of the comfort that one touch from his namesake, the missing tomcat, would have provided. But where philosophy failed, her body’s instinct for survival took over. Tomorrow she would try to uncover the pipes from the ancient water tank mounted on masonry piers behind the house and use the rainwater collected there for boiling.
The two kittens scrambled up the empty bookshelves and jumped expertly through the gap in the skylight. But Queensly stayed behind, watching Eva with wise, compassionate eyes. The old cat climbed slowly up onto Eva’s lap and settled down, seeking not to be patted but to offer whatever warmth she could.
‘Good mother puss,’ Eva said softly. ‘Wise old mother puss.’
Queensly lifted her head to listen, then sprang off Eva’s lap to approach the door. Somebody was out there. Eva heard solitary footsteps crunch the frozen grass. She remembered how Freddie had often returned alone to Glanmire during the last years of his life. Perhaps this was his ghost outside about to enter the dark ruin with a bottle of Skylark whiskey in his pocket. But these footsteps lacked the peculiar sound which Freddie’s crippled foot used to make. They stopped outside the caravan. The voice that called out belonged to another time. It had aged greatly but was still unmistakable.
‘Mrs Fitzgerald? Are you in there?’
‘Yes,’ Eva replied, unsure if the voice was real.
The door opened, and a figure stooped her head to enter, stamping her wellington boots to inject some warmth into her feet. ‘Mother of God, Mrs Fitzgerald, you can’t be sitting here getting your death of cold. Have you not even got a stove?’
‘I have,’ Eva said. ‘I just haven’t lit it.’
‘Well it’s high time you did.’ The young woman drew closer, only she wasn’t a young woman anymore. Maureen’s figure had become thickset, with glasses and permed hair tinted slightly blue. But her essence had not changed since the morning in 1939 when she stood before Eva as a girl in old clothes ready to scrub down the flagstones on her first day as a maid.
‘Is that really you, Maureen?’ Eva asked in wonder. ‘I thought you went away years ago to America. I often think of you enjoying every mod con over there.’
‘And amn’t I the dumbest woman in Christendom not to be over there still enjoying them. Instead I’m back living in my sister’s bungalow. My weekly highlight is bingo in Castlebar every Tuesday night. You remember my sister Cait, don’t you, Mrs Fitzgerald? She married Jack Dowling from out Carrowkeel way.’
Eva nodded, recalling a barefoot child standing up proudly on her father’s ass and cart when Maureen’s father would arrive with turf for them during the war. Freddie might have always referred to Maureen as ‘the maid’ in his letters, but during the war years she had been like a younger sister to Eva and an older sister to Hazel.
‘Now let’s get a fire going before we turn
into icicles.’ Maureen opened the cast iron stove to peer inside. ‘Mother of God, but you’re an awful woman, Mrs Fitzgerald. The fire is set and all if you’d only toss a match in its direction.’
‘I wasn’t cold.’
‘Are you codding me? A polar bear would need an electric blanket tonight. Will you not come up to Cait and Jack’s bungalow and stay with us?’
‘No.’ Since she received the news from Kenya nothing had been able to touch Eva. If she had cut her own wrists she would not have been surprised to find her blood too frozen inside to seep out. But now in Maureen’s presence she felt an infinitesimal stir inside her, a foretaste of human warmth, like a hairline fissure in a sheet of ice.
‘Well, pass me the box of matches and we’ll make do here so. We knew colder nights together in that old house during the war.’
Maureen closed the skylight despite Eva’s protests, saying that if the cats wanted to come back in they could knock at the door like Christians. She rigged up a cylinder of gas and soon had a kettle boiling under a blue flame as she opened the stove again, and added in larger sticks and some turf. Finding a fork among the cardboard boxes, Maureen knelt before the stove to toast a thick slice of stale bread.
‘I had every mod con in the States true enough,’ she said. ‘A dish washer, air conditioning and more television stations than you could shake a stick at. But there were nights when I’d have swapped them all for the chance to make toast on a fork by an open fire.’
‘When did you come back?’
‘Six months after my Frankie died from cancer. They introduced protective masks in the chemical factory where he worked twenty years too late.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Eva replied.
‘You would have liked Frankie. He was a laugh. Even with a name like Bergsson he claimed to be half Irish. Bald as a coot by the age of forty and always smiling. He had a black man’s big teeth and a Cavan man’s laugh.’
‘You’re still hurting over him,’ Eva said softly.
‘To tell you the truth, Mrs Fitzgerald, every week the loneliness hurts more. When I was a girl here in Mayo the nuns made it sound as if I had only to hold a boy’s hand and I’d fall pregnant on the spot. Frankie and I were thirty years sharing a bed without one sign of a child stirring, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Oh, I had the best of neighbours in Boston, but neighbours are no substitute for kin when you find yourself alone. This toast is ready now. Where did you pack your butter?’
‘I’m a vegan now. I don’t eat butter.’
Maureen raised her eyes. ‘Mother of God, all the cows will be thrilled. They can enjoy a lie-in on Sundays. What do you eat so?’
‘A soya spread, when I can get it.’
Maureen brought over the toast and two cups of black tea. The caravan was starting to feel warm. Queensly deserted Eva to settle on Maureen’s lap.
‘This is the high life,’ Maureen remarked. ‘Here I am, dining with the gentry.’
Eva smiled. ‘I’m hardly gentry anymore. I doubt if there’s a soul in the village poorer. Name anyone else living in a caravan.’
‘Where you live doesn’t change who you are. Folks around here still see you as a lady. The big truck pulling this yoke was spied coming through the village. The whole parish is wondering how you think you can survive up here. Now eat up your toast.’
Eva put down the cup she had been holding between her hands mainly for its warmth. ‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I know,’ Maureen said. ‘Food has lost any taste since my Frankie died. But I make myself eat. I can’t believe that poor Master Francis and Miss Hazel are dead. I can see them still as children roaming about through the woods here. After Frankie died I found myself talking about him to strangers on the subway in Boston, to anyone who would listen. I couldn’t seem to stop blathering away. But a real lady like you wouldn’t do that. She’d suffer in silence, bothering nobody, stuck away in the back end of a wood. Cait and I cried our eyes out for you when news reached Mayo about your granddaughter. You and I never had any secrets during the war, Mrs Fitzgerald. If you’d like you could talk to me.’
Maureen’s fingers stopped stroking the cat and slowly entwined themselves with Eva’s gnarled fingers. Both widows sat in a silence that was broken only by the cat’s peaceful breathing. Then Eva spoke.
‘She was two months away from her fifteenth birthday and so beautiful. You never saw a child like her, Maureen, interested in everything, longing to embrace life. All the girls in the boarding school in Dublin loved her. They envied her going back to spend the summer with her father in Kenya. It was such a simple thing to happen, to get an insect bite. But they had no antibiotics and she caught a virus out there in the bush, too far away from any hospital. Everyone did everything they could, nobody was to blame. Everyone was heartbroken. I keep trying to be positive, Maureen. Alex will never face the problems that you and I have, she’ll never grow old and lonely, she’ll never lose her radiance. She was perfect and died perfect. I tell myself her death was quick and she didn’t suffer much. But my heart is broken beyond repair. Ten years ago I had a son, a daughter and a grandchild. I would have endured any torment and given my life gladly to save any of them. It just makes no sense that I’m still here while all three are dead. Life is simply not fair.’
Eva’s voice was quiet but she was crying. A kitten began to scratch at the door and Queensly stirred and stretched. Eva kept a tight hold of Maureen’s fingers.
‘But life isn’t fair, is it?’ Maureen said. ‘It’s not fair on those it takes and not fair on those of us who get left behind. What can we do?’
Eva relinquished her grip and rose to open the door and let in the kitten. The faintest trace of blood stained his paws. Out in the darkness he had been on a killing mission. Eva gazed out at the darkness.
‘We can live our lives,’ Eva said. ‘What other choice do we have? These mornings when I wake up – no longer even caring if I wake up – I feel oddly free. It’s a terrible freedom, but it’s the freedom that comes from knowing there is nothing more that life can do to you, that fate can have no more tricks up its sleeve. I’m numb with grief, Maureen, I don’t know if I’ll ever feel warm again. But I’m afraid of nothing now. My sleepless nights are over because there is nothing left for life to snatch away from me.’
‘Close over that door and keep out the cold,’ Maureen replied. ‘Remember the long nights during the war when we used to sit up talking, leaving the house only to fetch firewood? This time we can do the other way around. We’ll sit out here on the lawn and only go into the house for firewood. There’s enough wood there to get the stove going for ever.’
Eva laughed: a sound she had forgotten. ‘Won’t Cait be worried?’
‘She’ll think I’m off in Castlebar chasing after some bingo announcer with sideburns.’ Maureen’s smile could not prevent a glimpse into her own loneliness. ‘Jack will have the telly blaring full blast at home. They can have a good bicker like married folk do and I’ll not be missed. You can tell me your story, Mrs Fitzgerald, and I’ll tell you mine. We’re two old ladies going nowhere fast. We’ve all the time in the world now.’
Larry, Lay Down
Aifric Campbell
LARRY FOUND A HOBBY WITH EQUIPMENT, a counterpoint to the screens and the phones that yelled at him all day long. He bought a Canon Rebel second hand from B&H with a standard zoom, so he wouldn’t have to get too close. But walking down Canal Street to his first evening class he felt conspicuous, the carry case banging against his hip.
Cool, said a voice by the noticeboard. It was a boy with crystal eyes, airbrushed skin and a tumble of golden curls. ‘Languid’ was the word that came to mind, the way the boy teased a slow finger along the protruding lens. The kind of word Larry’s mother would use, the kind of way she would trace the spine of a book. The boy was modelling for ‘Life, Advanced,’ which was just next door to ‘Photography 1’ so Larry followed him down the corridor stealing glimpses at the cut of his jaw, the tender earlobe, all
the parts of a magnificent whole.
Clicklick, said the boy at breaktime and framed his hands into an air camera. Larry fiddled with the lens cap. Come on, said the boy, arranging himself against the wall. What, here? Larry gestured at the corridor, the passing students, but he could see already where he would crop, right there at the breastbone. Practice on friends and family, the teacher had just told them, take close-ups of your cat. But what if no one is available, what if you don’t have a cat? Larry had wanted to say. Was this going to turn out like everything else where you’re the only one who doesn’t have what is needed?
Pardon me, a woman’s hair appeared in the viewfinder. We’re starting everybody, the teacher’s voice called out through the open door. My number’s on the board, said the boy, backing away.
The next morning in the office Larry found he could already see things more clearly. He was alert to the arresting visuals in the everyday: a spreadsheet slashed with red pen, a jacketed swivel chair, Janine balanced on the spike of one pump. Financial Controls was teeming with artistic possibility. He positioned the Rebel on the corner of his desk and studied its form, a squat polycarbonate Cyclops with rubber grip. This is the one for you my friend, Avram had pointed to the wall where Agassi smirked beneath his mullet. Image is everything, he jabbed Larry rather hard in the chest and threw in a polarising filter, introduced him to the world of accessories that he would one day need.
Larry trawled the city for hours on Saturday until he found a benched couple in Union Square. His heart fluttered over a bump, his mouth dry but oh, how they glowed on his cinescreen that night: the girl with neon flip-flops leaning back against the boy, the boy’s lips grazing her hair. A scarf with thick beige bobbles covered her jeans like a fungus. So elated was Larry the next morning that he called unannounced to his mother’s apartment with a fistful of lilies which she batted away, shielding her nose from the stink. He sat at the marble counter and placed the camera case centre stage while she poured green tea, but his mother did not seem to notice so he took out the Rebel, trapped her in the viewfinder. Put that away this instant, she shrieked, scrunching the satin robe to her neck and stared aghast as if Larry had dropped his pants.
New Irish Short Stories Page 4