An Unravelling

by Elske Rahill

  ‘Oh yes, that reminds me darling, I have a list. You’re going to Brown Thomas isn’t it?’

  ‘A shopping list?’

  ‘Yes, darling. You know those Sloggi?’

  ‘The underwear?’

  ‘Good cotton knickers – the ones that cover your bottom properly, and cover your kidneys. I want you to get me six extra small and six medium, can you do that?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, Aoife, you should see the little rags that Cara wears, and Freya, my goodness you couldn’t trim a hat with the scraps she has for knickers!’

  Aoife lifts the filter off her coffee. She pours a big dollop of milk in, drinks a deep, tepid gulp and wipes her lip.

  ‘I don’t mind helping you, Mammy,’ she says, and breaths out to push this terrible soreness from her chest. She can see that her mammy is nervous though, knowing she has gone too far. She’s clutching at her hands again like a big squirrel, her shoulders up and her bony chest heaped beneath her gullet. Aoife speaks low and calm. ‘I’ll get you as many knickers as you like, Mammy, if they’re for you. You know I have no problem doing that. I won’t even ask you for the money for them. But I will not run around buying knickers for the Ladies Muck. I will not, Mammy.’

  ‘No. Alright then, darling. Well I want some knickers for myself then – six extra small and six medium, you know how my weight goes up and down…’ Mammy tries to grin but she is nervous, flicker-eyed, like a daring child. She stands. ‘I’ve written it out for you there and it’s with the money under the chopping board.’

  Aoife looks at her own hands – the perfect, smooth ovals for nails, and the incongruous chubbiness of her fingers – and breathes out. She can feel her mother move around the kitchen; slow and resolute. Two fifty-euro notes and a scrap of paper are placed ceremoniously on the table in front of her. Written in her mother’s careful, knife-sharpened pencil marks:

  Aoife Monday

  In Brown Thomas please can you get:

  Sloggi knickers, white (black or naked if no white) 100% cotton

  6 × extra small

  6 × medium

  Thank you darling

  Aoife raises her face to Mammy with her mouth open, a shout ripping at her chest, ‘You mean nude Mammy. Not “naked”, nude.’

  But Mammy has turned already, her head in the open fridge now. ‘Well I’ve made us a lovely salad for our lunch, darling, because I know you are slimming again. And I’ve made some nice mayonnaise too – one little spoon won’t do you any harm. But tell me this, would you like a nice herb omelette as well with some scallions snipped into it? Chives would be better but Freya brought back a lovely little bundle of scallions from that market in the park. I’ve been waiting for a visit from Sinéad though, with those wonderful chives she has growing there out the front. I haven’t had a word from her all week. Do you think I should call over?’

  She closes the fridge and turns back around, four eggs cradled in her long, speckled hand. She looks Aoife right in the face, all conspiratorial smiles. ‘It’s not just you who should be slimming you know! Sinéad was always such a fine figure of a girl growing up and – well! Well, my God, when I saw her last time, well, I said, “Sinéad, what sort of a bottom have you grown?” and “Oh stop it, Mammy,” she says, so I said no more. But she doesn’t have the bones to hold all that size, you know! It’s as if the fat can hardly hold onto the tiny frame of her. And the great thighs! Well, Aoife, I was shocked. Were you shocked? That happened very quickly. But what did you tell me there? When did you say you last saw Sinéad?’

  13

  MOLLY SETTLES INTO HER chair, massages the gnarl in her knee. It’s the cartilage – worn down, or swollen, or both. Never mind. She will just sit for a while, get her rhythm back. Aoife can really take it out of her sometimes.

  She pulls her knitting bag onto her knee. She’s not going all the way upstairs for the sock. She’ll start something new.

  Baby Peig is always in hand-me-downs; neglected looking. It would be nice for her to have something of her own. Molly still has some of that fine merino 4-ply, a soft brown, like a wild baby rabbit, and so light to work with. She’ll make one of those lovely little matinee coats. Perfect for a child of that age. Something Cara can throw around the baby to put her in the pram.

  Molly opens her needle case and selects a round needle, size 3.25. The yarn is easy on her fingertips as she casts on rhythmically. She might have to look at the pattern in a bit, but she knows for certain it’s fifty-three stitches for the back, then five rows of garter stitch. How many of those little coats has she made? Oh ten at least. At least. Didn’t she make three of them for Aoife – pink, yellow, green?

  Is it the change or what? Molly doesn’t know, but she can really blow up these days, her Fifi. Doesn’t like to be kept in the dark. Fuming. Fuming is the word. That’s the word she’ll use when she tells Freya about it. Aoife always had a temper. The great scenes she could make as a child – the jiggle of her cheeks and the fat boxer fists and the stamping of her sausage-roll legs. Dinny would be splitting his sides with the sight of her. She who must be obeyed – that’s what he used to call her. Aoife used to make him laugh. He laughed a lot in those years. Everything was going well – Aoife was healthy; Dinny had friends; he was getting ‘recognised’ – that was the right expression. But the grief was still stuck into Molly. She hadn’t the strength for it. Some days it hit her in the gut as soon as she opened her eyes. Some days, she couldn’t breathe for it, she couldn’t see—

  Molly stops and straightens out the stitches. She’s lost count now. Starting at the beginning, she marches her forefinger up along the needle, counting in twos, but, my God, she is weary after that visit.

  She who must be obeyed. The way those cheeks huff and puff. Those dark, low brows that she got off of Dinny.

  What is that, forty stitches?

  She pushes the needle into the ball of wool, places it on the shelf. The cardigan will have to wait. She’s too tired now.

  God, her knee. Freya might make her a compress for it, when she gets in.

  She could try to snooze, here in her chair. An afternoon snooze and by the time she wakes it will be evening. Freya. The little boy. They can have a light supper together, cosy at the table.

  She had Aoife in Dublin, in the Coombe Hospital. Dinny was more stuck into all that Soho nonsense by then than ever before, so it was a great defiance when she said she was going home and that was the end of it. She was not a contrary woman; she was never a fussy wife. It was only that she knew – and she knew, she really did, and she told Dinny in no uncertain terms – that she couldn’t let the child out of her otherwise. She went back to Ireland with four days to spare. She can remember on the boat, the enormous relief, rubbing her belly. ‘We’re alright little man, we’re alright.’

  *

  When she first saw it, Molly thought there’d been a mistake – a girl. It was much bigger and much redder than the baby she had been expecting.

  14

  AT QUARTER TO SEVEN, Freya parks tilted on the pavement outside Dermot’s house, and rings the doorbell. When there is no answer she gets back into her car and waits.

  Dermot’s house is near the river – a pocket of squat houses under a close, colourless skein of clouds. The street should be charming – the uneven rooftops and stone windowsills, the fat, smoking chimneys – but it’s shadowed by a mirror-faced office block that smothers the milky sun. Even on sunny days, these houses must seem dark and mossy and cold.

  At seven, she texts Dermot to say that she’s here, and places the phone face down on the passenger seat beside a bunch of ailing daffodils.

  Cars pass quickly on the wet road behind, and she can hear tense laughter from the off licence on the corner.

  Every few minutes she checks her phone for a reply.

  Twice she calls Cara, ready to tell her everything – how she sent Jem off with someone he’s never met before, how Dermot’s neck clenched when he spoke, how he is not where he said
he’d be and has not answered the phone and it’s nearly ten past seven. But she makes herself hang up before her sister answers. She often panics like this over nothing. She needs to control her anxiety. That’s what Cara says. In any case, she’s been so stupid. Cara will kill her.

  *

  The daffodils will have wilted by the time she gets them home. She should have bought the closed ones. Grandma loves daffodils. In springtime the house used to be filled with vases of them from Mrs Brereton’s, but the new neighbour doesn’t cut them.

  At ten past seven she gets a reply from Dermot:

  I suppose you expect people to answer your texts even though you never answer theirs? I hope you’re not going to raise my son with that kind of hypocrisy.

  He is trying to scare her. This is a game. She will wait. She will not panic and she will wait.

  There is a little cul de sac off this street – a ring of five houses, and in the middle of the road, standing on a chunk of concrete with an illegible plaque, a queer little statue of the Virgin Mary serves as a kind of traffic circle. Her features have been smoothed by decades of cream gloss paint, and Freya watches the half-shut eyes and sad mouth fade as the evening closes over.

  It’s getting dark. She turns on her dipped headlights and for a flash there it is in front of her – the shape of a child, younger than Jem, a toddler standing there, arms limp by its sides.

  Sometimes this happens when she’s tired. Driving in the dark that figure sometimes leaps across the road, making her jam dangerously on the brakes. Often, it is more of a sensation than an image, nagging there just out of reach, a child about to fall off a high ledge, or get sucked under a wave. Sometimes, when she’s leaving an empty room, she reaches down to take a little hand that isn’t there.

  She stares down at the daffodils – the cut stalks breaking through the damp newspaper – but still from the edge of vision she sees him. A little boy, just the shape of him; arms and legs and a pot belly, waiting in her headlights to be seen.

  *

  Shortly before eight the cool light of a car swings into the street, casting bleary shadows down the footpath and up the jagged rows of houses, unveiling for a moment the mournful, downturned face of the Virgin and the narrow hands folded over her heart.

  The car loops into the enclave and pulls up outside Dermot’s house, facing Freya. She can hear the sorry lurch as the handbrake is tugged and the engine stops, and after a moment the street is dark again. Her body warms with the impending relief of Jem’s presence; that she will be near him soon – the heat from his skin, the smell of him. She closes herself up against her own softness and steps out of the car just as Dermot steps out of his. She can feel him watching her and it makes her skin keenly aware of itself – the cool air on her cheek, her ankles. The soles of her shoes feel thin as she walks the few steps towards his car.

  Dermot is drunk. She knows that as soon as she hears the too-forceful bang of the car door. He stands, swaying in the middle of the path, arms out, presenting himself as though expecting applause. She can’t see Jem. Dermot moves to his doorway and turns, grinning sloppily at her. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘there you are.’

  ‘Yes. Here I am.’

  Dermot keeps smiling, his eyelids fat from drink, and Freya hears her own voice, the ridiculous, boring sounds she is making. ‘I’ve been here since seven, Dermot, as we agreed. Where’s Jem?’

  She knows the panic must be showing in her face, and she knows this will please him. She is at a loss for anything to say, with him leering knowingly like that, as though what he is looking at is not her at all but something on her, or something past her, something she doesn’t know about – lipstick on her teeth, a flake of snot… Her voice trails off and she looks past his eyes to the outline of his ear and wonders if it is the same as Jem’s.

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘He had a great day.’

  ‘Good. He needs to go to bed.’

  ‘He is in bed.’

  ‘Okay, Dermot, where is he? It’s time to take him home.’

  ‘He is home. Haven’t you forgotten something, Freya?’

  Freya looks dumbly at him.

  ‘The forms?’

  ‘Oh… They’re not valid, Dermot. They’re for primary or joint carers… The form is to confirm that you have Jem at least half of the time, and you don’t, so…’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s asleep in my bed. I just went out for a few things.’

  ‘Could you please wake him. It’s time for me to collect him.’

  ‘It’s time for me to collect him.’ He imitates her in a voice that reminds Freya of her mother. ‘Is it now, Freya? Is it time for you to collect him? And who decides that?’

  ‘Okay, Dermot, that’s fine. I’ll go to the Guards.’

  He rolls his eyes. ‘You love drama, Freya, don’t you? I remember that about you, alright. Relax. Come in, he’s in here.’

  He unlocks his door and walks in. She takes a breath to call after him, then follows instead. Low ceilings. To her left, a shut door, and ahead of her, a short passage leading to a kitchen-sitting room. She pulls the front door, but doesn’t let the latch close. The smell of the house is like the smell of the flat he used to live in – wood and mould and different colognes.

  There is something contrived about the kitchen, like a set for a sitcom. There is garlic hanging from a butcher’s hook; three framed album covers on the wall; and on the mantelpiece a row of about ten books. One of them says ‘NERO’ in very large, red lettering on a white spine. Dermot sits on a leather couch, arms spread high along the back; a performance of ease.

  ‘So, this is my place,’ he says, lifting his palms and looking around the room.

  ‘Where’s Jem?’

  ‘He really likes it. Do you have that paperwork for me, Freya?’

  ‘I told you I can’t sign it, Dermot – that would be fraud. We can talk about it another time, when we’ve sorted out your access.’ There are stairs leading from the kitchen to a second floor. The banisters are of naked pine, the wood rough and incongruously new.

  ‘Just got those put in,’ says Dermot.

  ‘Oh. Nice.’

  ‘I locked the bedroom door when I left. If the kid woke up, I didn’t want him wandering out and falling down the stairs.’

  ‘He fell asleep?’ It can’t be true.

  ‘Yes. Little kids sleep, Freya.’

  ‘I’m going to take Jem now, as agreed. It’s his bedtime – after his bedtime. We can meet face to face another time and discuss the forms and everything.’

  ‘But that’s not true is it, Freya? As soon as you leave here, you’ll ignore me like you always do, won’t you? And then I’ll have to take you to court…’ He rotates his hand limply from the wrist, ‘and blah blah blah. More drama.’

  ‘Dermot, bring Jem down here now please or I’ll get the Guards.’

  ‘Listen to yourself!’ he says. ‘Just listen to yourself! I’ll get the Guards – and what? He’s my son, according to you! Is he my son, Freya?’

  Freya turns to leave, and maybe this is the wrong thing, for he is very drunk and Jem is in the house. Her mind reaches for better options and slips and can find none. Dermot blocks the exit with little effort. She is surprised at how much taller he is than her; she hadn’t noticed that before. She moves towards the small gap that is left between him and the doorframe, but in a dipping motion Dermot fills the whole space and shakes his head, his hands up, as though he is defending himself against attack.

  ‘It’s a simple question, Freya.’

  ‘Yes, he is. Please go and get him now or I will have to go to the Guards.’

  Something rolls across the ceiling, and Freya looks up.

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Freya. What is it with the drama? Always the drama with you.’

  Short, weak knocks on a door. Dermot raises his chin and shouts, ‘Hang on, Mister! I’ll be up in a minute. Just have to deal with something
here!’

  Freya stops herself from calling out to Jem – it would frighten him to know she was here, trying to get to him. She can’t trust herself to conceal the fear in her voice.

  ‘Go and get him.’

  ‘That’s not a very polite way to ask, is it? Say please.’

  ‘Please go and get him, Dermot.’

  ‘In a minute,’ he says. ‘I just need to do something first.’

  Hands spread across the doorframe, he leans down and plants a soft kiss on her mouth, and Freya can’t move. Jem is upstairs. She should leave, get the Guards, but would they come? Can they? Dermot draws back to see what his kiss has done to her. He wraps his hand around her middle and her waist feels tiny to her, and pliable. She is a fraud for ever having thought more of herself. He kisses her neck now. His tongue moves on her skin, slowly and almost wet, like a slug. She shivers him off her. She can’t help it.

  ‘I’m getting the Guards, Dermot.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Freya.’

  ‘Bye,’ she says, and she wonders if she means it, because Jem is still banging on the door and what if the Guards won’t interfere? What if she leaves now and can’t get back in?

  ‘I need to do a wee!’ Jem calls.

  ‘Just a minute!’ calls Dermot. ‘Sorry, Mister, this will only take a minute and then I’ll be up to you!’

  ‘Dermot, give me the key please?’ Shit. There are tears breaking in her voice.

  He smiles – his mouth reminds her of some animal, but which? ‘Don’t cry,’ he says, ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. He’ll be okay for five minutes, then I’ll give you the key.’

  And Freya stands there not looking at him; standing there while Jem bangs on the door. Eventually she says, ‘He needs to go to the toilet.’

  Dermot gives a breathy laugh. ‘He’ll live.’ He takes her wrist and tugs it a little, moving past her. ‘Come and sit with me for a minute.’