An Unravelling

by Elske Rahill

  There are things she has almost forgotten – her mother in the kitchen, speaking close and hard like that, the smell off the pot, the housecoat she wore. They come to her unexpectedly, very suddenly, very fleetingly, and she tries to hold them now.

  And Lily. The tiny baby she was. The gaunt little arms. The way you could see the veins running beneath, bright and mysteriously logical, like something from another world.

  She has no shame, Eileen, no love, maybe. Maybe she has no love. Didn’t they give her all they could though? Was she born that way? A tiny baby, her Lily, so tiny when she arrived but such a long and hard labour, such work to bring her in – a tiny, bald thing, born with her fists clenched and all the rage of the world there in her first high scream.

  Molly had wanted to paint once; she had aspirations, less grand than Eileen’s, granted, (the Turner Prize how are you!) but too big, all the same. She had such ideas once, of all the things she would like to paint.

  She drew Dinny with hard pencils on thin paper. It was cold, upstairs in his rented room. Those first touches, opening her blouse and unbuttoning his shirt, just to feel his skin on hers as he kissed her; the surprise of that. She couldn’t feel ashamed of those things, even if she wanted to. To think how they posed for one another, laughing and making love and then sitting again to be sketched.

  There is something to be said for religion; for the mysticism it makes. It had seemed supernatural – the pull of desire between them. All the rapture she knew was for God, and so their attraction had seemed to her a sacred thing; a spiritual thing. The idea of lust didn’t occur to her, the idea that they were merely beasts; that the animal parts of human life could be the most beautiful. It was only when she felt her first child open out of her that she understood that.

  Silly girl. But she is glad of that silliness. Oh, she had her times, beautiful times that not everybody gets in life.

  Once they arrived in London, though, she stayed very quiet about the paintings she had in her. It would have humiliated him if anyone knew his wife had notions like that. He never said it to her; they both just knew suddenly that it wasn’t on. As it was, he did not belong in Soho – the Irish there were all wealthy big-house fellows pretending to be poor, no place for a working man. Was he a laughing stock, her Dinny? In his clean, rough shirts and hardwearing boots? There was so much posturing had to go into it, and Dinny wasn’t made for such things. Sometimes he came home at night and wept into her breasts, mewing like a kitten.

  The art scene in Soho was ruled by a ham-faced fellow in a leather jacket and she’s sure to this day that he used a compact on his face. She’s never forgotten that man, his waxy skin and the way his eyes twinkled with something like friendliness while his mouth twisted a cruel sneer. There was a time when Dinny hungered for the approval of such men. That man made very ugly pieces; rendered human figures meat, but by then he was already growing very popular and he had influence; it was important to be liked by him.

  Sometimes Dinny took her with him to those strange pubs they had there for artists to go and boast about themselves and drink with the right people. There was one called ‘The Caves’ but pronounced calves. There was an ash-frail figure always sitting at the bar – a Welsh woman who wet herself and slept with sailors. ‘The wizened whore’ is what Dinny called her, his beautiful lips hitching to a disgusted shape. Molly scolded him for speaking so crudely, but it was true that the woman smelled terrible and could be seen sometimes with her little breasts hanging out the side of her dress. She had skinny legs, stringy flesh, a mouth smeared so clumsily red. Someone told Molly – it was a gentle, quiet boy brought there by one of the queer fellows and ignored like a woman – that in Paris she had been lauded as some kind of painter. When she learned that, Molly had felt a trembling heat rise up her face and her scalp all a-scald; a feeling like anger that quickly settled to shame. One evening, when that woman stood and left, all who looked could see that she had dirtied herself right there on the barstool.

  *

  Stupid old woman, sitting there in the cold like that. Now her legs are stiff. A screeching feeling, like forcing the rusted lids off jam jars. Molly knows the importance of decent food. She puts an egg on to boil, but she turns it off before the water is warm, and sits at the kitchen table. She’s cold. She should turn on the heating. No, she won’t manage an egg. But the thought of the cheese and the thought of the ham send a terrible nausea going. She wishes Freya would come home – what time did she say she was finishing up? And the little boy.

  There were no bones in the broth – of course not. She would never be so negligent.

  Oh, she can’t think now. She can’t organise her evening now.

  She could sit in her armchair and watch something on the television.

  She should eat something. Even a little thing.

  From the adjoining room, the carriage clock chimes the hour. She counts four but she started late and can’t be sure. She likes that clock, the pleasant, steady dongs it gives out, anchoring the days. But what time is it? It’s hard to see the time on the microwave. Depends where you’re standing, like a watermark. She’ll go in now to the TV room to have a look at the clock.

  Oh, tired now. Let Freya and the little one come back and let all the hours of the day arrange themselves straight like a line of ants all marching towards the same home. Let today end.

  Jam. She could manage jam on a slice of bread and butter. Old people die from not eating. They just stop eating and then they die. That’s the way she’ll do it, rather than go softheaded and stone-limbed, shrivelled up and bushy-chinned – but not yet. Even half a slice is something to keep the body ticking. That’s the trick – just choose the task and carry it through, keep the time looping over.

  Molly takes the bread from the cupboard and lays it on the table beside the butter. Then the jam.

  Time is closing up now and there are things Molly will have to do – the letter.

  She takes a knife from the drawer, a plate from the cupboard.

  Molly has known for some time that she will have to open the letter. She will not be here forever, and she doesn’t want to leave it after her for the children and the grandchildren to find.

  It was in the days before his stroke that Dinny wrote it, and Molly knew he wasn’t there in the head – the terrible sadness that came upon him, and the things he said about their children. What had happened to Eileen, he wanted to know, and for hours that morning he shook his head and said, What happened with our Eileen? But it was their eldest daughter, Aoife, he was trembling against. He wrote so slowly. Oh, his hands had started a terrible shaking, and it was the hardest thing age could have done to him. It made him throw his brushes at the canvas and slash at his work. Even as he moved his pencil so unsteadily across the page, he muttered to himself – Aoife was the greatest of his disappointments. She was an idiot, he said, she was a greedy, cultureless whore, and she had no business attaching herself to his name. She had no notion about art. He sealed the letter and wrote Aoife’s married name on it. Molly was supposed to post it. She drove out to the post office right then, but she couldn’t do it. It was the word ‘whore’ that froze her stiff at the wheel. She lied to him that time, when she came back in. That was one betrayal, but to open the letter was quite another. She kept it in the glove compartment for three days, wondering what to do, but then Dinny had his stroke and she forgot about it in the relief; and in the horror of the beaming imbecile face he had on him for those weeks, and the heaviness and stiffness of him lying there. Afterwards, she took it from her glove compartment and put it in the drawer in Dinny’s office and she has left it there for six years.

  She told Freya about it – she didn’t plan to tell, she didn’t even consider it, but she suddenly came out with it one day as they were sitting together. Freya said she was right not to post it. She will open it, or ask Freya to. She will do that soon, in the next days she will do it.

  When she has them all out on the table – the butter and bread and j
am; the knife and the wooden board in the shape of a leaf – she sits herself down and begins to butter a slice of bread.

  She can go easy now. She can go gently with herself. If she takes her knitting to bed instead of sitting in her chair, well no one will know. She has that good sitting-up cushion that Sinéad bought for her. Freya and the little one will be back late, but they will be back. In the morning there’ll be the little boy in his pyjamas at the table, waiting for his porridge and his orange juice.

  Molly avoids her image in the bright hallway mirror. She doesn’t like putting on the house alarm. She’s always afraid she won’t be quick enough or she’ll put in the wrong number and there will be a great noise. That happened once, when it was first installed. There she was, flustering around for the number and then it was too late – she couldn’t even think for the wail of the thing, or push the numbers or anything, and she had to scurry into the cloakroom to phone Freya like a helpless old biddy.

  She puts the numbers in as quickly as she can.

  *

  Upstairs, she sits at her dressing-table, bends to help her feet find her slippers. She pulls her padded bed jacket on over her blouse and makes her way down the hall to the toilet. I’m off to powder my nose – that’s what Dinny used to say whenever he needed to use the toilet, or I must make my ablutions…

  *

  In her bedroom she undresses slowly, laying her clothes on the chair – her decent brown skirt and her nice springtime blouse. There’s a chill in the evening, but oh what a day it was today – so bright and airy and all those daffodils have come out again to defy the prissy new neighbours and their irises with miserable streaks for faces. She puts her knickers and her vest in the laundry basket, and flings her stockings at the washbasin.

  She gets them done quickly – rubbing the toes and the heels with her bar of Sunlight soap, rinses them one by one under the cold tap, and squeezes them out before laying them across the back of the chair to dry.

  She puts her dentures in a glass with that cleaner they say you should use now, carefully brushes her four remaining teeth, washes her face.

  That’s the real meaning of that word ‘ablutions’ – she found it out only recently. It means to do your topping and tailing and your teeth and all that.

  Dinny.

  She got on with it after Dinny went. Her days go on, there are things to do. But night is the hard part. Sleeping alone; she hasn’t got used to this part.

  *

  After she has only just counted eight chimes, they come. The growl of the car, the click at the door, the shuffle – there is nothing wrong with her hearing – she can hear it all – the yip of the alarm and Freya pressing the code in like a little tune 334 – a moment of hesitation while she finds the 8 – whispers. The little boy speaks, a high voice breaking the stifle. ‘Shhhhhh’ says his mother. She is winding the clock – that’s what it is, or she is letting the little boy do it. Together they are winding up the clock so it keeps time. Molly slides her hand under the pillow and pulls it in under her chin. What a lovely big pillow. Time is winding up, yes, but it might be gentle as the rise and meld of warming pastry.

  The little boy. Molly smiles and nestles down into the sheets. She’s fixed the sock, pulling it right back to the turn and knitting all the way to the toe. She sewed it up so smoothly you’d never find the seam.

  They are beginning up the stairs – great slow creaks. Some things are so nice. Sleep is so nice, when it comes.

  Lips on her cheek. The blanket is tucked up over her shoulder.

  ‘Night night, Grandma.’

  Something brushes her hand. ‘Night night, Mimi.’

  7

  FREYA WAKES TO THE shudder of the windowpane. Loosened by the wind, a clutch of ivy gropes at the glass. On the bedside table her phone is flashing red – a missed call, or a text message – and her first thought is of Jem – some emergency. Of course not. He’s here, just the other side of the wall. She tucked him in herself.

  It’s a missed call and two texts. She recognises the number immediately.

  Unless you want me to come to Granny’s door, pick up when I call.

  She was immensely stupid to ever have contacted Jem’s father. Grandma hadn’t pressed her about who the father was or any of that. It was Cara who convinced her that it was the right thing to do, to tell him about Jem, tell him he could ‘be involved’. But Cara didn’t know what he was like. All he kept saying was ‘cunt’ and ‘bitch’, and ‘Why did you keep it?’ Why did she? Was it sentimentality, or something more? She could have got the morning-after pill. There was a number of things she could have done. Sometimes she thinks she got pregnant on purpose; that she knew Jem was there, waiting to be born. That she wanted him. His birth felt like a kind of reunion.

  The second message was sent only ten minutes ago:

  Cunt call me back or I will take legal action.

  A drowning sensation in her chest – she realises she has been holding her breath. It takes effort to exhale. She reaches for the glass of water beside the bed and forces herself to take a little of it into her mouth. Sometimes he can go six months without contacting her, and then there are a few weeks of texts and calls. She can tolerate that, so long as he doesn’t go to the courts for access, or turn up here, or at Jem’s school…

  Jem is chatting to Grandma. She can catch the inflections of his voice, but not the words. Quietly, she crosses the hyacinth-perfumed landing and leans in the doorway of Grandma’s bedroom. There they are – Jem sitting up in the bed beside Grandma, his legs sticking out straight and the blankets across his lap. Grandma is sucking her dentures into place as she bends to the nightstand for her glasses. She pushes them onto her nose, draws back a little and peers at the book.

  ‘Oh yes!’ she says. ‘The lovely book with the owl family. You know your Aunty Cara drew these? Isn’t she a clever aunty? And look what it says at the beginning, “For Jem”… you were just a tiny baby when she made those pictures.’

  Jem smiles fondly at the idea of himself as a tiny baby – his smile and tilted brows imitating Grandma’s – but Freya can tell he is impatient for the story to start.

  ‘She was always an artist, you know, your Aunty Cara. Her granddad said she came from the Old Masters… but she has her own style. She always knew what she thought, never went in for nonsense. You know once, when your mammy was very little – not much older than you – we were all together in a lovely hotel called the Shelbourne Hotel, in the city centre…’

  ‘Mammy!’

  Jem has spotted her. He stands on the bed, arms stretched up, as though about to leap into the air.

  ‘Good morning everybody,’ says Freya. She sits on the bed, letting Jem wrap his arms around her neck and climb into her lap.

  Grandma pulls off her glasses. ‘Well, Freya. Did you have a good sleep, darling?’

  ‘A great sleep.’

  ‘Good. Nothing like a good sleep.’

  Jem twists himself off Freya’s lap and clutches one of her arms, pulling her up towards the headboard.

  ‘Come in the bed Mammy. Mimi is doing a story.’

  ‘I’ll get the porridge on. You have your story and then come on down.’

  Jem harrumphs, falling heavily on his bottom beside Grandma.

  ‘Okay, but eggy bread okay? Not porridge.’

  ‘No Jem, I’m working today.’

  ‘Please, Mammy! Please, eggy bread. I can help!’

  ‘No, baby, you had pancakes yesterday, and your Aunt Cara is collecting you at eleven…’

  ‘Poor darling,’ says Grandma, ‘isn’t your mammy a terrible meanie? Come on and we’ll make you some eggy bread, it won’t take long. We can have the story tonight… You put your wellies on for me, and your jacket, and we’ll go and see if there are any eggs in the henhouse.’

  *

  While Grandma and Jem are making breakfast, Freya gets ready for her party. Just one today; a fairy princess party. She does her makeup in the hallway mirror – pale, sp
arkly eyelids and lots of blusher. The idea is to be as cartoonish as possible without becoming monstrous. She can hear Jem and Grandma in the kitchen…

  ‘Sugar?’ asks Grandma.

  ‘Check!’ shouts Jem.

  ‘Eggs?’

  ‘Check!’

  ‘Four of them…?’

  ‘Check!’

  ‘Cinnamon?’

  ‘Is this it?’

  ‘That’s the cinnamon, yes.’

  ‘Check, check, check, check!’

  Freya uses hairpins to fix a string of roses around her head. Then she hangs her fairy wings on the back of the front door so that she won’t forget them on the way out.

  ‘Well, Jem,’ says Grandma, ‘you are the best eggy-bread-maker I ever have known!’

  Freya lifts the lid off her coffee – it hasn’t all filtered down yet. ‘Don’t let Cara see that you’re still buying these filters, Grandma. They aren’t very good for the environment you know.’

  ‘Well, it’s Fairtrade it says.’

  ‘But all the plastic, Grandma.’

  ‘I’m allowed my one sin, Freya. I like my filter coffee.’

  ‘I might buy a coffee press, you know, something like what Cara has? It’s not good, throwing away a plastic cup every time we have a cup of coffee…’

  Grandma turns to Jem. ‘Isn’t your Mammy a terrible saintly one? If a cup of coffee is my only vice, Miss Freya, I’m doing very well thank you.’

  Freya checks the clock – nearly half ten. ‘So, Cara will be here around eleven Grandma…’

  ‘Yes, marvellous. That’s perfect. You know, I told Aoife I might go over to her for Sunday lunch.’

  ‘Oh well that will be nice Grandma.’