by Elske Rahill
‘It’s very good for you.’
‘Freya says we are killing the Bolivians… they need all that birdseed over in Bolivia. They’re starving for it…’
Nothing is ever good enough for her mother, but Eileen feels no resentment now; only forgiveness. Things are coming right at last, and just in time.
Her mother can’t walk now without her frame. It’s a pity, but in a way perhaps it’s for the best, for now her mother can’t bustle about, averting her eyes, avoiding the question, shutting her out. Now there are long afternoons where she sits by her mother’s side, talking and talking, and she knows her mother has come to appreciate her at last.
‘Where’s Polina?’
‘She’s gone off for her lunch, Mammy. Don’t worry, Lily is here. I’m making lunch for us.’
Eileen looks down at her blue gingham dress. It was Anton, the facilitator of the ‘Awakening Your Truth’ workshop, who told her she needed to get in touch with her feminine energy. He was right. She feels good in the gingham dress, the way it springs out at the waist, the way it swishes when she moves. It makes her feel like little Lily again. Daddy’s little Lily. Pretty, cheeky, spunky little Lily.
Eileen used to sit by her Daddy’s feet and lift them one by one out of the warm, soapy water, and clip his toenails and scrape the dirt out from under them.
‘Ow.’ Her mother is trying to raise herself out of her chair again. Eileen kneels by her, the big skirt lifting and settling in a lovely dome. She needs long hair to go with this new look. Her hair is still toffee-coloured, hardly a grey in sight – it’s a sort of miracle, and she should appreciate it. Her sister Aoife went grey at thirty. If Eileen had long hair, she could plait it, or put it in bunches, but her hair is taking so long to grow past her ears…
‘Are you hungry, Mammy?’
‘Yes, darling – there wasn’t a biscuit left in the house for elevenses; of course I am hungry.’
‘They weren’t good for you, Mammy. Processed wheat… You know I really think that, after sugar, wheat is the most toxic of carbohydrates. Anton says there’d be no war or rape if it wasn’t for wheat.’
‘Is that right, darling? Well I miss my elevenses…’
‘Well, we’ll sort a few things out now and then we can eat.’
‘Yes, okay…’ Her mother winces dramatically, her whole body suddenly tense and her hand lightly touching her knee and flinching away again, as though it burns. ‘Fetch me some Paracetamol, darling, will you, it’s very sore.’
‘In a minute, Mammy; we need to sort this out now, Mammy, and no more evasion, okay?’
‘What is it?’
‘I found him. I told you this yesterday, Mammy.’
‘Found who, darling?’
‘Oh Mammy, no! I refuse to play this game with you. You know who! My brother. I found my brother and I want to bring him back here and have him buried beside Daddy and you.’
‘Leave things alone, will you darling? Leave things alone.’
‘He’s my brother, Mammy.’
‘Let him rest. Ow. My pill, Eileen.’
This is not the first time Mammy has taken extreme measures to avoid what Eileen needs to say. After she reached her dead brother that time – the medium’s voice going high and sweet, her palms spreading and her eyes rolling back – Eileen had come straight to Mammy to tell her the message. He wanted to be buried beside Daddy. At first her mother didn’t want to hear it – she wept and trembled and all that, but Eileen knew she’d thank her in the end. She was just beginning to get through to her, when in came Aoife, throwing a real spanner in the works. It was Aoife’s fault, leaving that big Brown Thomas bag there for Mammy to trip on, but Eileen is certain Mammy did it on purpose – she didn’t like it that Eileen was the one he came to.
‘It’s what he wants, Mammy.’
‘No, darling.’
‘No? NO?’
‘No darling, leave him be, please.’
‘Well I’ve gone to a lot of trouble Mammy, for you to just turn around and say no – you may be happy to leave my brother in a pauper’s grave, but I’m not.’
‘Please Lily, quieten down darling. Rest easy darling, please.’
‘Do you want me to leave, Mammy, is that it? Do you want me to leave you here in your chair? You want me to leave so you can piss yourself again right here in your chair?’
‘Don’t Lily, don’t go. What do you want, darling?’
‘It costs me a lot you know, driving back and forth, getting your shopping – the price of petrol, for one thing.’
‘Well take it from my purse then, darling, whatever you need.’
Her mother’s handbag lies all day by her feet like a faithful dog. Eileen lifts it into her lap and feels around for the purse. It’s not easy for family carers like herself – she heard a woman on Joe Duffy yesterday saying it. It’s not easy because the state support for carers is minimal, and it is a full-time job. Perhaps she should call up Joe, and tell him about her brother. But people can be very close-minded about these things; very quick to dismiss anything they don’t understand. Perhaps she should get long hair extensions while she’s waiting for her hair to grow.
The notes are filed neatly – fifties at the back, then twenties, then tens, and one crumpled fiver at the front. She slips two fifties from the back row of notes, folds them and tucks them into the white, lace-edged socks she is wearing. Then she looks at Mammy sitting there mightily, like Mother Courage with her mouth drawn open, both hands on her knee. A sudden indignation flashes through Eileen – she will not give way to rage, but she will take what’s due to her. ‘And the milk, Mammy, and the millet… how do you think I buy those?’ Ridiculous that she, the daughter of Dennis Kearney, that she should be there worrying about the cost of hair extensions, living off her tenants like some kind of a nobody.
‘Take what you need, darling. Disgusting amounts of money I have now, you wouldn’t believe the bank statements. And isn’t it well for me.’
Eileen takes another two fifties before buttoning up her mother’s purse. That will do.
‘What do you want, darling?’
‘I won’t be treated like this, Mammy! I won’t hang around here, waiting on you hand and foot to be treated like this! Who cleaned up your shit when the Solpadine made you shit everywhere? Who wiped the shit off your legs, Mammy? Who scrubbed your shit out of your skirt? That skirt you’re wearing right now? Me! Me, that’s who!’
Her mother needed to hear that – the sobering truth of it. Eileen has to be firm, as well as kind. After all she’s been through in life, she has at last learned not to let herself be taken advantage of. Eileen was once an innocent, but she has learned to be tough. It took some trials and tribulations though; the married man who duped her, and the dark gremlin of a child she bore him. How she loved that child – for the first six weeks she even fed her from her own breasts. She should have known immediately, of course she should have. She was expecting a boy to carry on Liam’s gifts – and then out came a girl who looked nothing like him, but Eileen persisted. She gave that child every opportunity but she was a bad one; dark-haired and dark-hearted and wrong. Some wrongness you can see straight off – by the shape of the skull or the width of the eyes or whatever – but there are other kinds of wrong that take some time to show. She thought the second one was the right one – white-blonde hair and great green eyes – but she was a useless idiot without a note in her head and so fat, my God, so fat. Never mind – the truth is that all Eileen ever really needed was the courage to access her own specialness, her own gifts.
She knows she’s got through to her mother by the sudden gulp, the bright trail of red spreading like ivy up her neck to her cheeks. Her mother’s mouth, once so sensual and womanly, has grown lean and masculine, little puckers of loose skin hanging down either side of it with a gravity that says she understands how much she owes Eileen. She’s clutching her knee now, her eyes squeezed shut. ‘Get me a painkiller, darling, will you?’
‘
Let’s get this sorted first, Mammy. I have the form here, and the cheque book. I’ve done all the legwork that you couldn’t be bothered doing – I have his birth cert, his death cert, your passport, all I need is your signature for the exhumation, and a cheque. When we’ve got you better, I’ll bring you to see the new plot…’
‘Darling. Get me my pill, will you please?’
‘Let’s just get this sorted now, Mammy, and then we’ll do all that. And we might even change you into your nice blouse then after lunch, what do you think? Aoife is coming later to see you, Mammy. She’s bringing Valerie. Won’t that be nice?’
25
MOLLY HAS STRANGE DAUGHTERS. But there must be some sense to it. They were knitted into life in her private nooks; they are the culmination of it all.
Growing up, they escaped her. Always she was looking, looking and looking, trying to see them clearly like those magic pictures you have to stare at in the right way, but now she never will understand for her mind is full of snow – a blinding thing – and thinking is like wading through it. It is heavy. It stops her breath; cold in her mouth.
There are nightmares in her. She can hear them braying now in the silences left when words slide away. Now she knows they are coming for her, their hooves growing louder on the packed earth, the terrible muteness of them before they shriek.
There are things better left in the dark.
Did it happen after the birth of her little boy, or only with her daughters?
Her daughters’ first years were haunted by the darkest possibilities. She would see it with every blink – the choking – and she would put her face close and her hand on the little chests to feel the breath. Walking down the stairs, she would have to stop and cling to the banister, for fear that with her next move the baby might slip from her arms. She could see how the head would be dashed on the steps – the blood congealing in the silky newborn hair. She knew the silence. The sense of waiting; waiting to believe the thing that has just happened, waiting for the mind to catch up; the lungs, the heart.
Dinny shrugged; the shadow side, he said.
It became worse with every birth, so that when the last one came – scrawny, fussy little Eileen – Molly had only to look at her to see every violence that could befall the child. She couldn’t tell Dinny the gruesome things that went on in her mind’s eye. As she knitted, she would fight the images of the needles stabbing her child through the eyeballs, in through the ears, the tiny anus. She could feel it; the resistance and give of that tender body. Everything Molly did was terrifying. She couldn’t chop an onion or she thought of what that knife could do to her baby, the neat slices it could make, the way it could open her. If she boiled a pot of water, she could hear the screams of scalded girls.
She told Mrs Brereton a little of it. Mrs Brereton had something like that, she said, after her son was born. She said she used to dream about climbing up onto the roof and letting him drop. In the dream, she said, she had no remorse, but she was very frightened of what her husband would think.
The visions made Molly fearful for Lily, and she was given to panics over nothing. She couldn’t bear to see her cry, and nor could Dinny. There was a feeling between them, a sense that she might be taken from them at any moment, that they didn’t quite have her. People said she was too protective. They said she indulged Lily, spoiled her. Dinny’s mother said it, and so did Molly’s sister Kat and her Aunty Doll. They warned her.
That’s why when that thing happened, she wasn’t sure had she imagined it or what. She heard it, didn’t she? But Lily was giggling so much, perhaps she had misunderstood?
‘Mammy! Mr Edwards is putting his fingers into my knickers again! My front bottom Mammy…’
And when she rushed into the good room, Dinny wasn’t there but off fetching something to show his friends, and the three men looked up from their whiskey, their faces bewildered. Lily was sitting on Edwards’ knee, smiling, and Danny – a really decent fellow – said, ‘Honestly Molly, I was right here the whole time. I don’t know why she said that…’
Molly’s face was numb with the shock of it. Her voice sounded like it was coming from outside her, and far away. ‘Lily, stop pestering Daddy’s friends. Come and help me in here in the kitchen.’
Edwards was Dinny’s best friend. He was often about. They could sit for hours, chatting, drinking whiskey; sometimes when Molly came in with the messages, he was there. He was a very talented man and very knowledgeable about Irish folklore. He was what they called ‘cultured’, and sometimes she thought Dinny was flattered by his friendship. He drew books for Lily, lovely books full of pixies and fairies.
Was she wrong to say it to Dinny? He wrote Edwards one of his letters and they never spoke again after that. The other friends – Danny and Casey – they stopped coming so much.
Even back then you could never tell, with Eileen. You could never tell if she told the truth or a lie and you could never understand why she said the things she did. For a reaction that’s what Dinny used to say, Lily likes a reaction. Doesn’t matter what it is…
And when Molly asked her about it that evening, and even months later, all Lily did was laugh at her. She looked her in the eye and laughed and laughed, as though she was being tickled.
26
DAINTY WRISTS, TINY WAIST, the neat little chin of a cat – the girl just blinks back at her. Language barrier or no language barrier, Aoife knows insolence when she sees it.
‘HERE,’ she says, patting the hall console. ‘The book is HERE. You have to WRITE’ – she mimes writing in the air. She does it very close to the girl’s face, but what of it? Aoife is the client, isn’t she? This Mitzi or Kitty or whatever she calls herself – she’d do well to remember what her work visa is for.
‘You have to WRITE the NAME of whoever visits my mother…’
The girl nods, blinking slowly. ‘Yes.’
Many Christmases ago, Aoife bought a doll for Valerie. It had dark eyes like that, hardly any of the white showing.
‘Write the TIME—’ She taps her watch, then with two hands, she demonstrates something coming towards her, ‘—they COME, and the time they—’ she shoos the imaginary person away, ‘—GO.’
‘Yes.’
‘Remind me what your name is?’
‘Katie.’ She’s wearing a very cheap chiffon blouse, big doily collar on it. The buttons run down between her small breasts. Petite – that is how that sort of figure is described.
‘Well, Katie. You write the time they come and the time they—’ Aoife chops at her forearm with her other hand and lets it finger-march in the direction of the door ‘—LEAVE.’
‘Yes, I understand.’
‘Do you?’
‘Mum…’ Aoife turns to see her daughter standing in the door, big hands hanging by her sides, her face tilted, earnest as a child’s.
‘Mum. You’re shouting…’
‘Valerie, what are you doing in the hallway? Why aren’t you with Grandma? I told you to stay with—’
‘She’s asking for Katie.’
Aoife’s throat clogs. She can feel the redness of her cheeks. Her eyes water slightly.
‘Okay.’
She heads back into the kitchen, the petite Katie hurrying behind.
Putting her handbag on the kitchen table, Aoife calls, ‘I brought you some chocolates, Mammy.’
The carer rushes to Mammy. ‘Did you want me, Molly?’
‘Is that my Fifi giving out again?’
‘Not giving out, Mammy. I brought chocolates… I’m just telling you I brought you chocolates, and you say I’m giving out…’
Mammy doesn’t look up. She’s speaking to Katie, who is kneeling by the chair, smiling–Ha! Bright gums and a clutter of discoloured teeth. Not so pretty after all!
Valerie squeezes Aoife’s elbow. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Stick the kettle on, Valerie.’ She returns to her handbag, rooting out the chocolates. ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong. The Ladies Muck haven’t been wri
ting their names in the book when they visit. So, I told the carers to write it in. It should be no great challenge for them to log visits in the book, should it? I bought a log book. I showed it to them. I said “you write in the names. If they don’t sign in, you write it in the book.” What could be simpler? Yet here we are: no names are logged for today, but there’s no doubt that someone has been here.’
‘How do you know, Mum?’
‘Mammy’s ring is missing, and there’s all this mess. Look. All you have to do is have a look around. Crayon under the armchair. Apple butt in the fireplace.’
‘Oh. Well, you’ve explained now anyway. I’m sure they’ll write it in from now on. Do you want coffee is it?’
The carer is standing at the threshold to the den, apparently delighted with herself.
‘Your mother has been in good form this morning. Haven’t you, Molly? You had a good appetite at lunch, didn’t you? And you are wearing your nice cardigan, aren’t you? That looks very cosy.’
Aoife smiles tightly. ‘She prefers to be called Mrs Kearney. Please do not patronise my mother.’
‘Okay.’ Lips closing over those frightful teeth, the girl walks past her to the kitchen door. ‘No problem. Well, I will leave you alone. I will be in my room if you need anything. See you later Molly.’
And off she shuffles, to snuggle down in Aoife’s childhood bedroom. She is wearing the most unprofessional shoes Aoife has ever seen – plastic clogs with rubbery flowers stuck to them.
‘Valerie, are you making the coffee or what?’
‘Hang on…’ Valerie is writing something into her phone, frowning. That’s all she’s been doing since she came back – tapping at her phone, grunting. The minute she arrived she got into bed with a hot water bottle, claiming period pain. Aoife dragged her out to brunch today – a nice little cafe in the village and she found herself worried that she might bump in to someone, that’s how bedraggled her daughter looked. She tried to talk to her a bit about what she wants out of life. ‘Don’t you think about children?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t it be sad if Grandma never got to see your children?’