by Elske Rahill
While he cried on her ankles, it came back to her – such a queer thing to say – and it made Molly hate him so much that for the first days of Aoife’s life, her nerves tingled, her breasts were aflame with the milk that didn’t come. She was sick with it.
In Dublin he rented a tiny bedsit with a carpet that stank, and for a while Molly didn’t bother trying to keep things clean. She fed Aoife bottles with sugar and egg yolk in them. She still did her best in the kitchen, but how could she begin to clean? And the baby vomited a lot, and cried a lot. Molly is ashamed to think of it, how she allowed her failure and his to fester in that little place where everything was stained nicotine yellow. Perhaps he hated her too, then. But getting rejected from the RHA, coming back home – that was the best thing that could have happened. His luck changed, just like that. He was invited into the White Stag Group by one or other fellow and there he learned to keep his two cents to himself – his opinions about abstract art and all that. There he learned to work his way into his strangeness, not out of it. Things changed. Slowly at first, and then a decade later, with his hand around her waist at an opening, she realised suddenly, from the way the other women eyed her, that Dinny was the big man on the scene, the kind he had once envied. And they had money, suddenly. Suddenly they had money, though it took them a while to use it.
And what of it? What of it? That’s what her mam would say and she’d be right. Well for you and What of it?
*
It is too bright here and above her there are strips of light the same colour as the ambulance men because where are her glasses and the lights are hissing above her like tubes of angry insects and who is squeezing her hand? ‘Oh, Aoife’ says Molly. The cord was knotted, and the milk didn’t come for her, but here is her Aoife squeezing her hand, and little Lily, but isn’t there her middle girl too? Sinéad with the bovine slowness, gentleness, candidness; never asked for much from life. Where is her Sinéad? Oh, they are old, her daughters, my God they are old now and her Sinéad; barren as a Connemara beach. She would have made a good mother. ‘Oh, Lily,’ says Molly, ‘how old are you now?’
One of them rubs the hair back off her forehead. ‘Rest easy, Mammy.’ Her hair that is newly done.
*
Once, when they were in London (that was at the beginning, was it? Before her baby boy came and went) – a terrible flat in Soho – a dirty place though she worked day and night to keep it nice for him those first lonely months. Once – Dinny was out that night – she did a ridiculous thing, a foolish thing. (But she was very young. New married and giddy with herself and very young.) She painted a portrait of herself. She did it on the back of one of Dinny’s used canvases, and the colour sank into the untreated fabric, so flat that she had to keep on painting and painting to pull her face up out of it with the brush, like dragging herself from the bottom of a bright lake. Hours and hours she sat with a mirror and a lamp. She was disgusted with herself even as she did it, and she made sure not to use the Cremnitz White or the Very Expensive Blue, but it was only the next day that the real foolishness of it settled into her.
He must have come in while she was sleeping – was she already carrying their little boy by then? She woke late to find Dinny’s heat around her. She slipped out of bed to start the breakfast and there it was on the table – deep pencil lines cutting into the wet oil of her face and scrubbing out the line of her cheek. A thumb mark smeared away the creases she had so carefully tracked over her forehead (for she felt them there already, even if she was still a young woman then, new married and giddy with discovery and so young). Dinny had corrected her portrait.
Later, when he had sales and patrons, he could have left her behind and no one would have blamed him. He could have had a high life with one of the ladies of that circle – intellectual, high-society women. But that wasn’t Dinny. Dinny wasn’t that sort. Her Dinny.
*
‘We’re just waiting for them to come and get you Mammy – is the breeze too much?’ says Aoife, then to someone else she says, in a much bigger and angrier voice, ‘This is ridiculous! My mother needs care right now. In any case we are obstructing the entrance. If another ambulance arrives we will be obstructing.’
Oh, Aoife. Where did they get her from? Molly closes her eyes but she’s alright. Not going anywhere yet.
Death was not a thing her little boy understood. They put him in a pauper’s grave because that was before they had much money. There was just surprise for him and then nothing, but for her the moment stretched out – his mute shock and her banging his back and hoping she would hear him breathe now and cough but knowing she would not. Time could be a strange thing, overlapping and stretching out and pulling you back into what should be gone because the moment continued and she could not believe how long it stayed there under everything else. Even as her own body fell numb and her hands hung, there was a familiarity and calm and she felt she had known it already. She felt she was performing her shock, for the thing had already happened, long ago.
‘Hello, Mrs Kearney,’ says a big face over her, ‘my name is Sheila. I’m a nurse and I’m just going to take a look at you and see what we can do for you while we wait for the doctor. We’re very busy today…’
‘Yes,’ says Molly, and it is not a nice feeling when they wheel her down squeaky corridors into the belly of the hospital and behind her she can hear him – her little boy, though he didn’t say anything when it happened, only his brown eyes opening big big with the shock but he didn’t know did he, what was to come? That wasn’t knowing on his face, was it? Only panic, only surprise, but why does she hear him now calling her like it’s not too late already, like he could crawl his way back out of it, back up out of the flimsy pit they tossed him in because he was gone now anyway and no gravestone would bring him back and what with the cost of the Cremnitz White – drag him out of the catching, gagging moment and back to her if only she could reach for him because now she knows you heave the stomach of a choking child; you don’t bang the back and that’s what killed him and she knows it’s him from the big wail of his voice and he’s not choked but somewhere here in the hospital she knows it now for she can hear him wailing for her, she can taste it in the rot on her tongue and she can feel it in the pain ploughing through her; ‘Mammy, Mammy, I want my mammy.’
20
HER LITTLE BOY IS crying for her. She can hear him in the background, his voice broken by big heaving breaths – ‘I… want… my… ma… mmeee…’
‘We’re in the hospital now…’ Her sister’s voice is deliberately calm, almost scornful. ‘He’s fine, Freya, but he wants his mammy.’
‘What the fuck, Cara? I’m coming now. Tell him I’m coming now. I’ll get a taxi, I’ll be there soon.’
A car honks as she cuts across the sun-sliced road at College Green. It is taking her so long, so long just to get across the road.
‘He’s alright, he’s only got ten stings…’
‘How did it happen? Why weren’t you minding him?’
‘Denise is fine, Freya, thanks very much for asking.’
‘This isn’t the time for sarkiness, Cara…’
‘… but Megan’s covered in them. She swole up really badly. They had to give her adrenalin…’
Freya doesn’t give a fuck how many bites Cara’s girls got. She trusted her sister with Jem. She trusted her to take care of him and now he’s in the hospital and not even an apology.
‘He’s being a very brave boy, aren’t you Jem? You’re alright Jem… But Freya I think you should come. Call me when you get to the hospital and I’ll come and find you…’
‘I only have a tenner, do you have cash?’
PART 2
21
THERE IS A BUTCHER’S hook in the basement ceiling.
Using two hands, Sinéad hefts the bag up the stepladder. The tip of the hook is enamelled with dark stains. While she loops the slimy drawstring over it, she thinks of slaughtered pigs: dainty trotters tied with string; fresh slices of rasher with
the nipples and bristles still on.
When Sinéad first moved here as a bride, there were four sows and a farrow of piglets every year. In spring they sold all but two, and last year’s pigs were slaughtered noisily by someone her mother-in-law called ‘my great little slaughtering man’. The killings left the air vibrant and reeling, as after a heavy rain. A smell like monthlies hung in the yard for days.
But after Terence’s mother died, Sinéad left the sows celibate. They were too human; the big, dignified eyelids, white lashes, the terrible particularity of their ears. She fed them peelings and scraps in their sorry little pen and it was a relief when, one by one, huge and tough-fleshed, creaking like boulders, they toppled over, dead.
The bag drops with a decisive thunk, swaggers once, then hangs still, weighted by the fragrant squelch of boiled apples.
There is a kind of cold very particular to being beneath ground. It works into her muscles, tightens her jaw – she should go up to the warmth of the Aga. But she stands there staring, her knees stiffening, until at last the pectin begins to bead out through the muslin; tiny pinprick globules, like blood rising through a fresh graze. Drop by drop, the amber swell gathers into fine, slow rivulets, eking into the basin beneath.
She had no idea how much work apple jelly was. But when she saw the crates of apples on Mammy’s back step, she was seized with a sudden hunger – is that what it was? Or greed? She felt desolate suddenly, bereft, as though everything she could touch and know herself by was pulling away from her. She was only calling in to check on the hens; Aoife told her they were being neglected. But it shocked her to be greeted at the door by her young blonde niece wearing Mammy’s apron. Freya moved comfortably around the kitchen, filling the kettle, reaching for the biscuit tin, offering her tea-or-coffee. The house smelled different. The child was there at the table, sitting before a saucer of quartered apple, and he gave her a look like cold breath on her neck.
‘Are you cold, Sinéad?’
‘Someone just walked over my grave.’
Sinéad looked out the back window at the haggard apple tree. They had spent the morning gathering the windfalls, Freya said, smiling, and did Sinéad know how to make them into jelly?
‘Easier if I just take them home, Freya, you’ve enough to be doing.’
‘Oh. We were looking forward…’
Sinéad sighed in triumph when she had all the crates packed into her car. But then, halfway home, she was seized by regret, thinking of the cross face on the little boy, and the way Freya’s skin turned very pink, her hair falling to catch the fluorescent sunset as she lifted them into the car for her.
It was more work than Sinéad had imagined – cutting out the worms and the rot, weighing them, timing them, taking their temperature as they simmered for hours.
No wonder Mammy used to go spare over the apple jelly. You knew autumn had set in when she was heard bellowing from the utility room, There’s apple jelly hanging. Nobody touch the bag! Girls? Girls do you hear me? No one is to go near the apple jelly! Sinéad used to stand and watch, hypnotised by the steady slide and drip, battling the urge to feel the apple goo through her fingers. Squeezing the bag would let bits of mush into the jelly, making it cloudy and less disposed to set.
How could she have forgotten that smell? The clean, spicy applishness of the pips, the hidden sweetness opening in your lungs. It perfumed everything. She would smell it when she woke in the morning, on her clothes throughout the day. It reassured her.
Mammy worked so hard to make that kind of a home for them; a childhood that had the smell of baking bread on it, and cake, and the molten boil of jam. Some evenings, when she leaned over the bed to kiss Sinéad, there was a terrible weariness to her voice, as though the cords were fraying. Goodnight, my darling.
Her father’s mood could change everything. He was the weather in which they basked, or against which they shored up their silence, their smallness. You could tell the minute you came downstairs in the morning – the temperature in the house would have shifted. Mammy’s large fingers groped at her wrists. She wouldn’t make things like jam or jelly during those periods, but spent all day mixing Daddy’s paints and getting his dinner right. His rages could go on for weeks. The house was very quiet during those times, except for Daddy’s mutterings and roars – he murmured to himself constantly, and then he would shout and bang the table because someone scraped their knife on the plate, someone said the wrong thing, or wore the wrong thing or entered the room at the wrong time. Sinéad was very good at becoming invisible, but it was easy to make mistakes.
What’s that supposed to mean? An impossible question that instantly made Sinéad forget what she’d said.
Who do you think you are? Another impossible question.
At night they could hear him from their bedroom, I’ll kill myself, if he gets the prize! I’ll kill myself Molly, I will!
Shush darling, the girls…
Don’t shush me, Molly! Don’t attack me for speaking the truth! Shush shush – that’s not the point. You’re ashamed of me, Molly, I know it. You’re right to be ashamed of me… Shit! It’s shit. Look! Come and look. Look at the elbow it’s wrong it’s wrong it’s wrong! It’s not what I meant at all!
She and Aoife always shared a bedroom. There were plenty of rooms, but Mammy thought it was strange for children to sleep alone. On those nights, Sinéad was glad of her big sister. The astringent heat off Aoife’s body when she lifted the duvet, the firm way she tucked it around Sinéad’s shoulders, and the steadiness of her breath.
*
‘Sinéad!’ Terence is on the basement steps. He calls to her softly, almost a whisper, as though the gloam down here requires it. ‘It’s your sister on your mobile.’
‘Which one?’
‘The mad one.’
‘Doesn’t narrow it down.’
He picks his way towards her through decades of clutter – blackly oiled pieces for long-gone machines, boxes of fermented jam, a horse’s foot topped with a gold disc, the animal’s name and dates engraved on it. When Sinéad first moved here, that foot was a doorstop.
‘Eileen,’ he says
‘Oh.’
‘Will I tell her you’ll call her back?’
‘No. I’ll come.’
He stops a small distance from her and picks up the horse’s foot. ‘It’s cold down here,’ he says. ‘Do you need help? Need me to lift anything?’
‘No. Thanks, sweetheart. I’ll be up now in a minute.’
The yellow apple water has worked up a beautiful sweat in the muslin bag. She checks how much is in the basin. On the internet it said to leave the apples dripping for three hours, but Mammy used to leave them overnight, so that’s what Sinéad will do. In the morning she will have to measure it out. She might need to buy more sugar.
Her husband moves with an unobtrusive shuffle, making him look older than he is. He is still wearing that cashmere jumper. Even the elbow patches have holes in them. She has long given up buying clothes for Terence. He is more comfortable in old, worn things. He likes things with ‘character’.
‘I’m going out to the boathouse.’ He manoeuvres around the dangerously sharp, rusted hinges of a tractor door, the horse’s foot in his hand. ‘I’m going to see if those corncrakes have left.’
‘Okay.’
‘Come out and join me for a whiskey if you feel like it.’
‘Okay. I might.’
‘You better come up then. See what Eileen wants.’
*
The boathouse is a rickety little structure that Terence built as a child. The windows are black with moss and there is water coming up through the floor. The wind splashes dark water against the windows. It has two chairs in it, and a little table covered in clammy newspaper. Terence spends hours there some days, drinking whiskey, watching the lake and listening for the corncrakes with a patience that makes Sinéad jittery. He might have made a very good father. He is interested in everything, but he has no desire to achieve or prove anythi
ng. Perhaps that’s why she married him – to cure her of her own restlessness, to counter the exhausting demands her father wrung out of a lifetime. But sometimes it occurs to her that their whole life together has been spent simply passing the time, avoiding the grist. Perhaps that is as it should be.
Until she met Terence she had never known a person could be so self-contained. He inherited his wealth and is neither proud nor ashamed, hardly even glad of it. His family had hobbies, and they bought and sold horses and paintings, but none of them, as far as she understands it, had ever earned their living. For generations, they had been selling off chunks of their estate, until there was only this house and a handful of valuable possessions and connections.
*
She wipes her fingers on a tea towel before picking up her mobile.
‘Hello.’
‘Oh, Sinéad!’
‘Hi, baby sister. Sorry, I was in the basement…’
‘Sinéad!’ Eileen’s voice rises to a whine. Is she crying? Is she pretending to cry?
‘What’s wrong, Lily?’
‘I’m so embarrassed asking you this, Sinéad. I’m so embarrassed. Oh God, imagine what Daddy would think if he saw me now, Sinéad!’
‘What’s going on, Eileen?’
‘My tenants – those officious pieces of shit, they won’t leave until their lease ends, that’s in three months. So, I am destitute, Sinéad. I am homeless. I’m fifty years old and homeless. Can you imagine what Daddy would have thought?’