by Elske Rahill
It is one of Grandma’s favourite stories, that Suzuki concert Cara did. She was only three – is it possible that she remembers it? But she does. The grotty guesthouse that they stayed in – Grandma and Mother and Cara. Cara remembers wetting the bed, and Grandma’s brows fluffy in the night and her eyes small while she stripped off the sheets. Then in the morning, with a scoop of shiny jam in a metal bowl, her mother lifting food up on the fork and letting it drop onto the plate, muttering.
‘What’s the Ritz, Mother? What do you mean?’
‘Shhh, Cara, your mammy was only joking.’
The special dress for the concert, the itchy matching tights, and the big stage full of children; the kaleidoscope shapes they made with their violins; rest position first, then holding the instruments up to face the audience, feet apart, their arms stretched straight for Stop Sign, and then up onto their shoulders until the teacher waved the stick to start. Could that have been real? Why had Grandma condoned it all? There’s that story she tells – One hundred and fifty little things on that big stage, and Mr Suzuki playing on the piano. And they all playing. And when it came time to take a bow, didn’t they all take a bow to the audience, except that little thing. My little Cara, the smallest one of the lot, who turns to Mr Suzuki and gives a bow. Because she could see! She could see he was the one who played so well you know. Such a little thing and so pretty that they put her at the front, and all the little ones behind her, they followed suit, turned to that old fellow at the piano and bowed too. Well, we laughed! We laughed… and everyone clapped. And when I told Dinny he said, ‘That wild little thing, I hope the world doesn’t ruin her.’
Some of Cara’s classmates went on to become prodigies; thin adolescents playing solo at the National Concert Hall, or dressed in green for tours of America. It used to make Cara cringe with her failure, when Grandma pointed out their posters, their reviews, their names billed in the papers, and always that story about the big Suzuki concert.
It was the new teacher who saved her. When she was seven, she was sent to Mr Cooney, a kind old virtuoso who smelled like lentil soup. After three gruelling lessons during which he sweated and flinched while she played, he said they would try a new approach. For the rest of her time with him he made a pot of orange spice tea when she arrived, and let it draw while he tuned her violin. Then they sat in his cluttered lesson room eating biscuits and listening to recordings of Jascha Heifetz, Cara’s violin lying at peace on its own armchair. After a year of this, he broke the news to Mother: Cara had no talent. The Lily raged and growled and said she could see it clearly now. Because she had been so sick through that pregnancy and she should have known. After that she could see everything that was bad in Cara – her gypsy hair and her big nose and the black sick heart she had. How long did Cara stay with her after that? She remembers being brought to healer after healer, her mother standing behind her and mouthing to them breathily, ‘My daughter has darkness in her…’ One man who took her up to a bedroom and put his fingers in her nose and ears. And a lady tried to teach her the piano but she would sit at the instrument and her breath would start flashing up into her head until she was dizzy.
Then she lived with Grandma and before long so did Freya.
Why was Freya dumped too? Cara should have been gifted, but what had been the plan for Freya? Her sex was a big disappointment; Cara remembers that. Their father’s wife had only daughters. Perhaps The Lily believed that bearing him a son would increase her status, draw him away from his wrinkly old wife. He came on a Tuesday and a Friday evening, and Cara prepared him whiskey on ice when he arrived. That’s what she remembers – the pleasant burn of whiskey in her nostrils, and the way he pulled his trousers up at the knee before sitting down, the way he jiggled his foot. But she can’t remember his face. She called him Liam, not Dad. He called her Little Lady.
*
‘Why is Denise allowed in the front? I’m bigger.’
‘Because your mammy has to be with you if you sit in the front, Jem. Otherwise the police would take me away.’
It’s a relief to open the car doors and let the children spill out onto the tarmac. As she lifts Peig into the buggy, Cara can see that she’s ready to nod off, so she tucks an extra blanket around her to encourage sleep. Having been warned, no doubt, of the danger of car parks, Jem holds firmly to the bar of the buggy, but Cara’s girls fling themselves around the place. They have lost a bouncy ball. Megan squats down, peering under the car, and Denise lies on her belly to retrieve the ball from behind the wheel, a spume of pale hair flung forward over the dirty ground. When she stands up, the ends of her hair are oil-black, like laces caught in a bike wheel.
‘Say thank you to Denise, Megan.’
‘Fank you DenDen.’
‘Here, Denise, let me plait your hair before it gets all matted… Do you want to go see the ducks?’
‘No,’ says Denise, wincing bravely as her hair is plaited.
‘No,’ says Megan, still grateful to her sister for rescuing the bouncy ball.
‘I want to see the ducks,’ says Jem, hopelessly.
‘Let’s see what we see,’ says Cara.
In a fit of optimism she slips a book out from under the driver’s seat into the mesh beneath the buggy. She can’t stand the caged-in playground, but thank goodness for the park. They walk onto the tarmacked paths towards the vast stretches of green, and Baby Peig’s eyelids start to flutter on the brink of sleep. Jem is still clinging to the buggy, that serious good-boy look on his face. Denise skips along beside, humming something, tapping a tune on her right wrist with the fingers of her left hand.
‘Oh Megan!’ She is shocked by the anger in her own voice, but Megan is prancing around in front of the buggy, squatting to pick up stones or branches, using sticks to vault across the path. ‘Stop it, Megan. I very nearly crashed into you…’
‘Mammy?’ Denise is still playing her wrist-violin.
‘Yes, baby.’
‘Do you know how I make sure each bit of the piece is different?’
‘How, my baby?’
‘I imagine a different animal for each one. There’s a lion bit.’
Denise scowls and bares her teeth, still humming.
‘Megan, stop it!’
Megan is running back and forth in front of the buggy, throwing a stick as high in the air as she can and watching it fall, the wheels of the buggy biting at her feet.
‘Megan!’
Megan stops suddenly, and the buggy snags in her trouser leg. ‘Owww!’
‘I told you to stop, Megan.’
Megan drops her hands by her sides, tilts her head back and begins to wail with her mouth drawn down into a parody of tragedy. ‘Iiiii stooooopped!’
A violent impulse twitches in Cara. ‘Stop it, Megan!’
Megan pauses for a moment and fixes Cara with a stare, teeth bared, her hands in fists and her pale eyes narrow. ‘YOU TELLED me to stop!’ Then she throws her head back and begins another long wail.
Baby Peig startles, looks around and starts crying too.
‘Megan, stop it! Look, now you’ve woken the baby.’ Megan’s voice lifts to a screech.
‘Megan, SHUT UP!’
Jem has let go of the buggy and is pressing his hands over his ears.
‘Look, Megan!’ Denise points to a dead tree. ‘Look at all the twisty sticks! There might be a nest in there, even. Will we go and look?’
Megan stops crying as quickly as she started, and rushes towards the dead tree to look for treasures.
‘Hide and seek!’ says Denise. ‘Jem, let’s play hide and seek – you seek and we’ll hide!’
‘Right – no one go beyond the grass,’ says Cara.
Cara walks Peig up and down until she falls asleep. Then she settles herself down on the roots of a tree to read. It’s Jem’s turn to seek now. He squats beside her, his hands over his face, counting very slowly and loudly, and the girls scurry off.
‘… twenty! Here I come!’
Then there
is a little oasis of aloneness. Her book is called The Queen of Bohemia. It’s about an underrated Welsh artist of the fifties. She bought it three years ago and has read the first page several times…
It’s Megan’s shriek she hears first, and the first thing she feels is only irritation at being disturbed, but then she hears Denise too, and Jem, and the shrillness of their voices; and when she looks up she can see the three of them at the other end of the green. She has to strain her eyes and guess at what’s happening, but she can make out Jem slapping at the air, Megan shaking her head like a sneezing dog and Denise trying to pull her away from the hollow of a tree, and then she knows what it is and she’s running towards them. And as she nears she can hear the electric charge of the wasps and she can see that they have made a big dark net over her children. The first sting is on her neck as she heaves Megan up by the waist and tucks her under her arm and pulls Denise by the wrist. ‘Come on Jem!’ but Jem just stands in the cloud of wasps, his mouth open, gagging for breath in the shock and pain of it. She can already see the stings swelling on his face. Grandma will kill her.
‘Fuck.’ She drops Megan onto her feet and hauls Jem under her arm, ‘Hold Megan’s hand Denise. Hold Megan.’
Then she’s running away over the tarmac with the buggy in front of her and the children wailing, Denise tripping over her feet as they speed along, and the wasps stinging her wrists and cheek, and it’s only now in the car park, after stripping Jem off, unplaiting Denise’s hair to release a live wasp, rocking the crying baby, that Denise’s face drops, washing red and white with the panic. Her lips pull down and open, all saliva and tears, brows glowing white in the bright face, and there is accusation in her voice as her cry rises up, ‘Megan!’
19
UNDER THE CHAISE LONGUE, a fine-tipped paintbrush. Molly is glad she has seen it there, and she tries to hold it in her mind – the tapering bristles hardened in slow-dried paint, the smooth, fine wood of the handle, the thick swathe of dust – so that it will always exist. A thing that Dinny touched.
The lost bits of the world – a dead shrew in the gutter, the blade of a chicken bone, an envelope on the table. That was why she began to draw – the space she could make for those things, the weight she could give them, by delivering them into her sketch book or out onto a great canvas. But for Dinny, it was all about the possibilities of flesh; the worlds it could contain and the things it could mean. He was compared, later, to that thick-throated fellow they knew there in Soho with the muscular jowls like the shapes of his own paintings – peachy powder on his face (Dinny said no-of-course-not, but she’d bet her life on it) and black boot polish in his hair – but that fellow painted human shapes into pure matter. He hated the life in them. For Dinny it was the opposite – it was about showing what was human, what it meant to occupy a body.
*
‘You’re alright, love,’ says the ambulance man, ‘shush now love, we’ll sort you out now, you’re alright.’ He runs a hand lightly down each of Molly’s legs and handles her ankles in a way that she finds not-decent. My God, would you ever, that she could lie with her skirt so askew, and her slip, and pain so crippling that she has no shame, she who kept her dignity always – not a peep out of her through four labours. Her mind is okay though. That’s the main thing – that’s the big relief. She can remember all the different types of clouds there are – cumulus is one – so her mind is okay and that’s the main thing. The other one is where the clouds spray thinly across the sky and she has always had trouble remembering that one.
‘I slipped on my daughter’s handbag,’ she is telling the ambulance man. ‘My feet, my feet got tangled in the handbag but my head is alright you know nothing wrong there, nothing awry upstairs, sharp as a tack, oh the pain…’ but is he hearing anything that she says at all? Are the sounds leaving her at all?
A pain that clamps down over her and over all the words and welds all of her together into a hard and silent sensation.
Her mind is okay and that’s the main thing. Okay enough through the pain of it, that she can plot her story out so as to avoid a hullabaloo over a little fall. Sharp as a tack and fit as a fiddle. That’s the main thing. She is saying to the ambulance man that she slipped, lifting a painting down carefully; ‘Dinny’s paintings, Dinny’s—’ but it’s the pain that’s silencing her and someone says, ‘Rest easy, Mammy, it’s okay.’
There isn’t one ambulance man, but two or three of them, all in blue and faceless but her glasses must be somewhere and she can hear her daughter saying, ‘Mammy Mammy Mammy?’ and it’s a terrible tug on her, that voice, and her tongue is slipping on the name of her little girl, what is it, oh who is it saying Mammy Mammy Mammy?
She is coming out the door – their own door; hers and Dinny’s, the studio they built, she is rising flat on her back over her own driveway and she’s not on the floor now anymore and she can find no faces to look at her but she can hear a voice she knows and a deeper, calmer voice that she doesn’t know and there is a touch on her hand but it feels far away and that is how she knows she is not right at all and not sharp as a tack at all because she can feel that someone is touching her hand but she can only half feel it and then a great sting somewhere in her but where?
Mr Brereton next door had a fall and next thing they knew there was a skip in the driveway and the house had the face of it torn off.
There is a loud sliding sound and a crunch and clank and the ambulance man is bossing: ‘Sit down please ladies,’ he says, ‘or we can’t move off.’
Has she sorted everything out? Where are things now with Davitt Dunlin? Where are things now with the will? What will hold that little brown-eyed boy up now if Molly loses her grip and everything she is making spills out into a tangled heap? Who will see him right?
Her daughter is speaking. ‘You have a cheek,’ she says and then another voice answers – another daughter – Eileen; her little Lily. Dinny loved that little thing. He painted her naked once, in the garden. The scoop of her pelvis, and the white plum of her sexless groin.
That’s better. She can sleep now; that’s better. Oh a silent, steady pain. That’s better, to be still and no sound and nothing.
Too bright the light, too bright and white, and the bump and roll beneath her too sore but she cannot lose her grip though her tongue can’t make the words now for the pain. Dinny’s affairs are not yet in order. The other clouds are the scraps of bog cotton speckled over a sucking bogland. Her uncle’s farm. Sharp as a tack. No, she is alright; her mind is alright and that’s the main thing. She is almost at the heel turn now on this second sock for her little man, the little brown-eyed boy, and she won’t forget the turn ever again. It’s only the pain making her eyes roll and the terrible shock of lying there shameless with her slip twisting.
She needs her glasses, for the faces are very unclear.
Dinny used to stare hard at people, and too close. He would begin a portrait at the centre – the space below the nose and above the lip – what’s that called? She knows what it’s called, or she knew… That was the focus, always – the rest of the person could be unearthed from there. Molly could see him watching people when they spoke, his eyes on that space, and that’s how she knew he was killing people into paintings.
‘Dinny’s legacy’ – the way her son-in-law said it, like he understood the whole thing in a man-to-man sort of way. Silly eejits, her sons-in-law, both of them silly eejits. Not a notion. Not a notion what it took; how it took the two of them to bring any of that work about. The other painters in Soho were all rich, even without their patrons. They’d have it that art comes from nothing – that’s what they would say – that they went hungry and made art from nothing. Such disgusting lies those were, and they knew it themselves, all the things that had to be so they could paint, all the things they needed to keep the work happening. Oh, the posturing that went into it all back then – everyone competing at hooliganism; men tipping their whiskey down the sink when they thought no one was looking. Those dinn
ers they had where there was paint in the salad and gravy on the canvases and champagne chilling in the coal bucket – who did they think they were fooling? They knew as well as she did that the work came from having the time, the paint (all that Cremnitz White, oh, the cost of it; Dinny had to have it brought over and they went meatless for months over the five tubes he bought that time), the canvas, the broth for supper, the sleep and the tea in the morning. She would wait until Dinny had drunk his fill. Then she would top up the pot with boiling water for herself.
There are faces peering over her but she can’t look back – her glasses must have gone somewhere when she fell.
Dinny had some dark times there in Soho. There were evenings when she could put his food down in front of him and he told her not to look at him while he ate so she didn’t. She sat with her face turned to the side. But he looked at her those evenings. He looked and looked and there was a terrible violence in it.
It was around that time that his portraits changed – that stunned dusk after their little boy and before Aoife. There was one with her stretch marks showing and her face half in shadow, and she was holding a pencil like a scalpel and there was a little stream of blood running down her thickened thigh and her skin was water-pale and she looked boldly out from the canvas and she looked more like her than anything she had seen before. He destroyed it after he was finished and never painted her again, but that is when the brutal and beautiful shadows entered his work.
She was still in the hospital when he came for her, all his paints in a trunk and a roll of canvas. He sat beside the bed and looked at Aoife and smiled, ‘Such a big one!’ Then he wept. Molly was pleased – pleased that he had come after her, pleased that he was moved by the sight of the child. But then he said, ‘Oh my daughter, your father is a failure.’ He spoke real slow, as though what he was saying was more important than the whole life that had just come out of her. ‘The RHA won’t have me this year – not one piece. I’m a failure, Molly. She will be ashamed of me. My daughter will be ashamed.’ And he laid his head on her ankles and he wept, ‘I’m a failure.’ She can remember it – because it is the only time it ever happened. She can remember that she hated him then, all of him, his beautiful hands and his poor sad mouth and the paint scabbing the cuff of his shirt. She couldn’t sleep for a week after Aoife came, for fear the baby would drop dead, and because she couldn’t stop remembering the night they laid out her little boy, just the two of them and their dead boy in their little flat in Soho. ‘Oh Molly,’ he said, ‘this is the worst thing that ever happened to me.’ It was a queer thing to say, but at the time everything was wrong anyway.