by Elske Rahill
‘I thought you were staying with Aoife?’
‘I can’t live on her charity, Sinéad. I’m going to have to come to Stokerstown House for a while. Can I? Can I come to you for a while, just until I get myself sorted?’
‘You can, Lily, but we haven’t done any repairs since last time. You remember you weren’t too happy last time. Too damp you said, and you thought the peeling paint was making you sick, do you remember?’
‘Has Terence not sorted that out yet, Sinéad? Protestants: tight. Daddy was right, they’d rather go shitty than waste a scrap of paper cleaning their arses… They take the lightbulbs with them when they leave a place, but I suppose you know that.’
‘Why don’t you just rent somewhere? Rent somewhere nice, or stay in a hotel for a little treat.’ Lily was given her trust fund, the same as the rest of them. It hardly seems possible that she’s lost it all.
‘Rent somewhere, Sinéad? RENT somewhere? My own house occupied by scummy strangers and my sisters won’t even afford me a spare room? I wanted to move into Mammy’s for a while, but Freya wouldn’t even let me in the door, Sinéad. She wouldn’t even let me in the door of my own home, the home I grew up in—’
‘I suppose, considering the way things are, Lily…’
‘The WAY THINGS ARE, Sinéad? THE WAY THINGS ARE? What’s that supposed to mean? The way things are.’
Sinéad isn’t sure. The way things are is that both of her nieces have a sort of phobia of their mother. It has never been completely clear to Sinéad, what happened. First there was Cara, a lanky, morose seven-year-old living with Mammy and Daddy ‘to give Lily a break’. Lily said she was a problem child, that she was violent, but Lily said a lot of things.
Then there was news that Freya was very ill – leukaemia. Mammy was beside herself with worry, on the phone to Lily day and night, driving back and forth to her house with chicken broth and bitters. There was even an article in the paper – Mother of Leukaemia Victim Shaves Head in Solidarity with Brave Little Girl. But there was no leukaemia, as it turned out, or chemo or any of it. Some kind of misunderstanding, that’s what Mammy said. Suddenly Freya was living with Mammy and Daddy too, and Lily was gone – she had left the country. She sent a letter asking Sinéad to rent out that big ugly house Daddy bought her in Dalkey, and have the money sent straight to her bank account. Sinéad nearly jumped when she saw Freya that time – so skinny, the nimbus of stubble on her huge skull. What Sinéad remembers is her collar bone and the blades of her knees. Her eyes looking out of their deep sockets made Sinéad think of coins lost at the bottom of a well. She was a tiny child. So bony, and such white eyebrows. She said her mother had shaved her head; a misunderstanding.
‘I don’t know Eileen – I don’t know. Of course, you’re welcome here.’
‘It’s not her house, Sinéad! It’s not for her to say who can and can’t live there. What next? Is Mammy going to be allowed home after the hospital? Or will she be told to RENT somewhere?’
‘Don’t be silly, Eileen,’ but she can’t stop thinking of Freya yesterday, wearing that embroidered apron, pouring Sinéad’s tea for her. Do you know how Grandma makes the apple jelly, Sinéad? She showed me last time but I didn’t pay attention… Somehow, Sinéad has never grown as close to her nieces as she would have liked. There’s only so near you can get to them. Despite all the smiles, the apparent warmth, they have a strange steeliness about their cores, both of them.
‘It’s up to Mammy, Eileen. But you know she’s still not herself. I think I’d just wait out the three months if I were you. It’s not worth upsetting Mammy, is it?’
‘Mammy wants her out, Sinéad. She told me!’
‘Did she? She doesn’t seem to know what’s going on at the minute, Lily, to be honest with you.’
‘She wants her OUT, Sinéad. Only she’s scared of saying it. I’m going to help her put it into writing…’
‘You are welcome to stay here, Lily. Just stay here until your tenants are out. Or, you know, talk to Brendan about it but I think you have the right to tell them to leave, if you’re moving back in yourself…’
‘Well, Aoife’s right, Sinéad. She said you’d be no help.’
Sinéad closes her eyes. She could do with that whiskey.
‘Sinéad? Aren’t you going to say anything?’
‘What do you want me to say, Eileen? I think you’re causing trouble for nothing now, to be perfectly honest.’
Sinéad looks out the kitchen window at the wet yellow field. A loud rain has started, great fat drops coming slantwise at the windowpane.
‘It’s raining,’ she says, ‘can you hear it down the phone?’
‘No,’ says Eileen. ‘It’s not raining here.’
She leans against the draining board and watches the rain, allowing the crackling silence to tighten between them, until Eileen hangs up.
At the back door she pulls on her wellingtons and her Barbour jacket, and makes her way out across the field to the boathouse.
22
HIS MAMMY IS WEARING the grey knitted dress with the pink cherries on it, and the man at the till smiles with his eyes going up and down the dress, counting the cherries in his head while he beeps their shopping along. Jem has counted the cherries. There are thirty-six.
She frowns at the man and Jem puts his fingers between hers and kisses her hand and leans his cheek against the end of her dress, and he touches his lips to her silver nails – smooth and hard like the outside of a car – but then her phone beeps in her pocket and she pulls away from him to take it out. Then the man says how much money, and Jem’s mammy drops the phone into her bag and looks quickly in her envelope-from-work and her teeth squash her bottom lip and her eyebrows fold and Jem’s tummy feels like a fist squeezing. His mammy doesn’t like when they have to put things back, and Jem doesn’t like it either, especially because he knows it will be the chocolate spread or else the jellies. But it’s okay. She gives lots of notes and the man says, ‘That’s great, love. Have a good evening now,’ and he gives her some coins with the receipt and then he winks at Jem and says, ‘See you now, buddy.’
When they get back to the car, they have to stuff the shopping in on top of all their things in the boot and it blocks out the back window. But it’s only when he sees his ‘Our Planet’ light sitting beside his booster seat that he remembers what’s happened and why he has that stingy sick popping up his throat.
His mammy bought milk, and Jem knows milk needs to go straight in the fridge, but his mammy doesn’t start the car. They just stay there in the flat car park outside Aldi and she unfolds the piece of paper again and looks at it for a long time and he hears her breathe for a little while – in and out and in and out like she’s sleeping – and then she says, ‘I think it’s going to rain, little man.’ She gives him a biscuit to eat, and a carton of apple juice with a straw, and they listen to a CD of a sad man singing and Jem looks out at the cars wheeling into the carpark and rolling out and the people putting their shopping into their boots and thumping them closed. Everything is soapy grey out there, like cold bathwater, but there is no rain yet.
Jem and his mammy have a special speaker on the dashboard – Bluetooth; it works with the phone, and the music sounds big and clean, not like in his cousin Denise’s car where they have tapes and you can hear the ribbon crinkling and pulling.
The two halves of Jem’s ‘Our Planet’ lamp are back together again, but when he thinks of the little bulb in there, his nostrils get hot and wet.
While his mammy was packing everything into the car – his Lego and his slippers, her books and her costumes and the little bottles from her dressing table – he was sitting on the step holding the two halves of the lamp in his lap. His Great Aunty Aoife and the other lady came out of the house to watch his mammy putting their things in the car, and he saw his mammy’s cheeks twitch, but the thing that made him really sad was the black thread waggling inside the bulb like a little bit of ash. He knows his lamp isn’t going to work anymore.<
br />
The biscuit has chocolate on the top with a picture of an olden-days prince made out of bumps in the chocolate. Jem wants to keep it for later but then the chocolate starts to get sticky in his fingers so he sucks it off, and licks it, and then he eats the biscuit bit too even though the apple juice is burning his tummy.
He knew that Mimi was coming home from the hospital soon, so when he heard the front door he thought it was her. He wanted to go and give her a kiss but it was a very important part of the Dalmatians – the part when the mammy and daddy dalmatian are sneaking all of the puppies away from the bad guys – and he was just waiting until that bit was over before he pressed pause.
It was his Great Aunty Aoife, though. When he came into the hall, she was there with her arms crossed, talking in a slow and careful way, and his mammy was holding a piece of very clean paper, with fold marks across it. She said to keep watching the Dalmatians while she packed a few things. She said they were going to stay in Denise’s house for a little while. The other lady was in the driveway, sitting in a silver car with no lid on it.
Jem clicked the Dalmatians back into the box as quickly as he could, careful not to touch the shiny part, but it was tricky because Aunty Aoife was standing very still in front of him with eyes like small torches and her tongue poking her cheek.
*
‘Well, little man,’ says Jem’s mammy, and she turns around from the driver seat and smiles at him, but then she sighs a crying sort of sigh, ‘your Aunty Cara is waiting for us. Best get you to bed,’ and Jem says, ‘Two more minutes,’ and then he doesn’t know why he said that.
‘It’s getting late.’
She puts on a new playlist before driving out of the car park and onto the road. One song says ‘One day yooooou’ll understand,’ and usually Jem and his mammy sing loud with that one, but now she sings quietly. She turns her head back to look at him and her eyebrows go up in a way that makes Jem’s middle so sore and frightened and her lips go into her mouth and she squeezes his ankle and as she says the words with the song there is a bad crinkle in her voice just like the tapes in Denise’s car that are running out and then she says, ‘Oh, your seatbelt Jem. Strap yourself in my little man. Best boy.’
Babies have lots of bones, more than children, and a child’s got more bones than a grown-up’s got. When he has strapped himself in, Jem asks his mammy how many bones he has in him and she says she doesn’t know.
‘Children have more bones than adults though,’ she says. ‘I know that. There was an ad on the TV when I was little, with a skeleton dancing around singing, “them bones them bones need calcium…” and the skeleton said, “A child’s got more bones than a grown-up’s got”, so I know that much.’
‘I know about that, Mammy. You told me that.’
‘The calcium makes your bones grow together. It was an ad for milk I think.’
*
Jem smiles at his mammy because he wants her to smile back but it gives him a sick feeling, thinking of his mammy being a little child with lots of bones. There are things he has heard about when his mammy was little like him, and it sounds like a bad land she was in sometimes, and frightening, and it gives him a terrible feeling like slipping suddenly and being not able to get up. His mammy smiles at him and squeezes his ankle and says, ‘My little man. You’re a great boy, Jem, do you know that?’ and Jem smiles but his tummy is twisting.
His mammy has fewer bones than him and that’s okay; that’s how come she can walk like that in the supermarket and smile at the man who fixes their car, and that’s why his mammy can make things safe and still for him, and not slippery like that feeling of thinking that his mammy was a little child like him before, with lots of bendy bones not-joined-up.
*
‘Mimi is older than you, isn’t she, Mammy?’
‘Just a minute, baby,’ says his mammy, ‘I have to concentrate here…’ but she squeezes his ankle again with one hand while she turns the wheel with the other so he knows she is thinking about him and feeling him there behind her and she will turn to him soon and say, ‘Sorry, Jem, what were you asking me?’ He understands now and he is so happy that he understands now. Mimi is older than his mammy and older than his Aunty Cara, and older even than his mammy’s Aunty Aoife. Mimi is old and so her bones are growing all together and that’s why her knees don’t bend so well and her neck doesn’t move so well for turning around and looking when he goes to see her in the hospital. He thought Mimi was coming home. But there’s the slipping feeling again – like that time on the ice skates that Jem didn’t like very much at all – the heavy blades for feet and the cold hard ice and holding onto his mammy but his mammy slipping too and the two of them slipping and nothing steady to grab. Because he knows now, and there’s nothing to ask his mammy now when she turns around in a minute to say what is it Jem because he knows for sure now and it will only make his mammy sad if he tells her, that Mimi’s bones are all pulling together, and that she will grow tighter and tighter now until she is only one bone, only one hard, bumpy rock and not his soft Mimi anymore.
‘Sorry, Jem, what were you asking me my little man?’
23
‘IT’S A GOOD THING you’re here, Freya. I totally forgot about it until I got her text…’
Cara is rooting in the cupboard, pulling out glass jars of grain and beans. She passes Freya a tall Kilner with a badly rusted clasp. ‘What was I thinking, inviting them? I don’t have time for this…’
Freya opens the jar: a sweet smell reminiscent of sweat. There’s a dried apricot at the bottom, wizened and complexly wrinkled, like a shrunken head. ‘I’d throw out this jar, Cara.’
‘… I wanted to work tomorrow. I really wanted to get to bed and work in the morning – Aha! Duck confit! Is it in date though…? Don’t tell them it’s from a tin, will you?’
‘Relax, Cara, it’s fine. It’ll be fine. Will I make devilled eggs for starter? You’ve loads of eggs. And then you make your main course. You have lentils – simple. Lentils and leek mash and duck. Do you want me to run out to the shops? Ice cream or something for dessert?’
‘Thanks, Freya. I have ice cream. Homemade ice cream. I’ll text Pat to get chocolate and wine. Peig’s asleep, Megan’s down; will you just get the others to bed and I’ll make a start here? What do I do? Just hard-boil the eggs?’
‘Yeah, just boil them for three minutes, then put them in cold water and I’ll deal with them. Make sure you leave me two eggs to make the mayonnaise with… Jem! Denise! Upstairs now it’s time for bed! Jem?’
*
She finds them on the landing. Denise is on her knees, crunching tin foil around one of Jem’s feet.
‘Silver shoes, Mammy.’
‘Magic shoes!’ Denise leans back on her bum and kicks her legs. Her feet are covered in layers of aluminium.
‘Don’t let your mammy see that, Denise. She’ll go spare. Come on you two, in your jammies quick. Put those shoes in your cupboard, Den.’
‘Is it because of the waste, Mammy?’
‘Is what because of the waste?’
‘That Aunty Cara will go spare?’
‘Yes.’
‘Told you, Den. And is it because of ‘Our Planet’ too, Mammy?’
‘Get into your pyjamas you two. I’m going to roll up the rest of the foil now so your mammy doesn’t notice, Den. If you hurry we can have a story.’
‘I want a story with just you, Mammy. No Den. And Grandma.’
‘Not tonight, darling.’
‘Mammmeee!’ calls Den. ‘Jem hurt my feelings!’
‘Oh stop it, Denise, your mammy is busy. Get into your pyjamas or there’ll be no story.’
*
When Jem is tucked in, he says, ‘How much longer, Mammy, before we can go home to Mimi? I don’t mind if her brain is tired. I don’t mind.’
‘In a little while, Jem. In a bit… another few weeks, baby, I think.’
‘When can I see Mimi? I need to tell her something.’
*
>
Pat is just in when Freya comes downstairs. His shirt and his paint-scabbed trousers are dull with wood dust, and there are parings dangling from his hair. He drops his trousers onto the doormat and steps out of them, begins to unbutton his shirt.
‘Hi Freya. What’s the story, alright?’
‘Hi Pat.’
Cara comes out of the kitchen with a tea towel over her shoulder. She kisses Pat’s cheek and then his mouth. ‘How was work?’
‘It was work.’ He has stripped down to a thick, sleeveless vest and long boxer shorts. He has strong arms, strong legs, two hairless patches at the tops of his thighs, long, frizzed underarm hair of glossy jet-black.
Cara picks up his clothes, opens the front door, and shakes them in the drizzle and wind, before rolling them into a ball.
‘Did you get the chocolate?’
‘Yes, what’s it for?’
‘We have dinner guests.’
‘What? What dinner guests? You didn’t tell me you invited people!’
Cara hugs the bundle of laundry. ‘I know, I forgot, I’m sorry, baby. It’s a pain, I know. It’s a couple whose kid is in Denise’s music school…’
‘I was looking forward to… I wanted an early night. I’ve had a long day. A long and boring day.’
‘I’m sorry, baby.’
‘Are the girls in bed?’
‘I just turned Denise’s light out.’ Freya moves towards them. ‘Megan is asleep. I’ll stick a wash on, Cara, will I?’ She reaches for the clothes. There is an adult smell – clean wood, dust and wet, day-old sweat.
Cara nods, relinquishing the ball of dirty clothes. ‘I’ll run your bath, baby.’
‘Oh, it’s hard for men,’ says Freya softly, a hint of Grandma in her intonation. Cara laughs, picking up the joke. She shakes her head the way Grandma does, ‘Oh it’s very hard for men.’