by Elske Rahill
Valerie is still staring at the phone as she fills the kettle and flicks it on. Aoife can no longer deny it: her daughter is pasty and scrawny. Is she a failure already? She was so full of promise once, going off to acting school, then moving to their sweet little Baker Street flat. Aoife envisaged a lovely little life for her; not hugely glamourous, but respectable, at least. But since graduating seven years ago, Valerie’s had no more success than a television ad for bathroom cleaner and a radio ad for a gym. Sometimes she tells them she is starring in plays, but they’re not real plays. The last one was in the upstairs of a bar. ‘Profit shares’, is what she calls them. A few years ago, they gave her one of the Dublin apartments to look after. It had been in her name for years anyway. Aoife hoped it would encourage her to come home, but she’s just stayed in London, not working, not acting, not dating, living off the rent money. Aoife wouldn’t mind all that if she looked after herself, if she had parties to go to, friends to see; if she made herself attractive. Brendan thinks they spoiled her. He even suggested they make her pay rent on the London flat.
Valerie sighs, and slides her phone into her back pocket before pouring out the hot water.
‘Are there any biscuits? Do you want a biscuit, Grandma?’
‘Aoife, what is this now? What are we making?’
‘Oh!’
In the adjoining room, Mammy is sitting in her big chair, running her fingers over the book of swatches – eight different shades and qualities of satin to choose from. ‘Are you making a gown to dress me in?’
‘No, Mammy we don’t need that anymore… We’ll have some coffee, Mammy. And I brought you some chocolates… Go and take that from Grandma, Valerie.’
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing we need. We thought Mammy might like to choose what lining to use… it’s from the undertakers.’
Valerie’s face drops. ‘Mum, are you serious?’
‘Not for her Valerie – what kind of a ninny are you? I’ll explain later.’
Valerie frowns as she puts the samples on the table, but she keeps quiet. She fans some chocolate bourbons out on a saucer. They make the shape of a flower. Her every gesture is lethargic, reluctant. She doesn’t look well. She’s not even thirty, but already, if she’s not careful how she holds her face, her mouth turns down into a sloppy grimace.
‘You having a biscuit, Mum?’
‘No. None for me. Valerie, do you remember that doll you got from Santa? You called her Snowflake. She had a blue dress with snowflakes on it.’
‘Doll? I don’t remember ever being into dolls.’
‘Don’t you? Oh well. How quickly they forget… I’ll do the coffee, Valerie, you’ll only make a song and a dance of it. Put that samples thing out in the recycling will you?’
‘Where’s the recycling?’
‘Oh forget it. Give it here, I’ll put it in my handbag for now.’
Snowflake was beautiful, with a weighty, bean-stuffed body. She closed her eyes when she was on her back, and when she was moved upright the eyelids slid open with a gentle click. Valerie slept with her for years.
*
Valerie carries in the tray as though it’s a great effort, and sets it down on Mammy’s footstool. ‘Will I milk your coffee for you Grandma?’
Mammy starts. ‘Who’s this now? Who is this now with the white face?’
‘Valerie is back from London to see you, Mammy.’
‘Where is Freya? Freya? Where is she?’
‘Valerie is here to see you, isn’t this a treat? Usually we only see her at Christmas but we’ve had two visits so far thanks to your clumsiness!’ Aoife forces a tight laugh from her chest, adding, ‘Thanks to you falling over my handbag like a ninny and worrying everybody…’
Valerie looks up sharply from her phone. ‘Mum!’
‘Let’s get a photo, Valerie. Kneel down there beside Grandma and let’s get a lovely photo of the two of you… Smile, Mammy!’ A slow, silent flash. The photo is terrible.
‘One more… Oh, I really wish you’d wear the right makeup for your skin-tone, Valerie, you look like a ghoul. No. Not enough light in here…’
‘Freya? Where is the little fellow? Have you lost him?’
‘No, Mammy. No. We have that all sorted out now, remember? You chose the light blue satin. We have a nice white box. We’ll put him in beside Daddy very soon. Don’t you worry. Valerie, why don’t you tell Mammy about London?’
‘I’m back from London for a bit, Grandma.’
‘Oh yes. London is very busy these days, isn’t it?’
‘Drink your coffee, Valerie. We need to shake a leg. You start packing up the hens. I need to sort something out here with Grandma, then I’ll come and help.’
‘What? Mum! I have a really bad period, I told you.’
‘Still?’
‘Still. And I didn’t bring any wellies.’
‘Don’t be such a whinger, Valerie. Just unpack the boxes at least, and close the henhouse. I’ll be out to help you catch them in a bit.’
*
As soon as Valerie leaves, Aoife starts to unpack the clever little camera. She bought the set online – she hates the rigmarole of buying online, but how could she have explained it all to someone in a shop? All about her nieces and her half-mad sister and everything? Aoife is no specialist when it comes to these things, but it turned out to be quite simple to use. It is a discreet contraption, a ‘nanny cam’. Certainly no one will ever notice it. Aoife has spent a long time studying the instructions. She printed them off so that she could read them properly, but really, they are very simple.
Mammy is snoring now. Big, comfortable snores. Aoife touches her hand,
‘Mammy. My mammy.’
She plugs the camera in behind the TV and sets it on top of the DVD player. She sits on the couch and looks at it – it’s so tiny there’s no way a person would see it, except for the little flashing red light to show that it’s on. Aoife has considered this ahead of time, and she has brought a lump of Blu-tack with her to stick over it; no one will ever notice. And such an ideal spot for it – the DVD player, facing the whole room. She is pleased to have thought of that. She can be wily too when she wants to be… And apparently all the footage will be recorded and sent to Aoife’s computer, so Aoife can just fast-forward to when the young Ladies Muck are there.
There they will be, giving Mammy whatever sob story they give her to get themselves on her will and extract cash out of her, rifling through her handbag and trying on her jewellery, and all the while Aoife will be sitting at home in the study, watching them.
‘Fifi,’ says Mammy – it almost makes Aoife jump. ‘Fifi, my poor Cara. What will she do with all those children and only her scribbles to rely on?… that beautiful little boy – so clever. You’ll make sure Freya has enough will you? Will you sort out a cheque for her?’
Aoife’s eyes water. ‘What kind of an eejit are you, Mammy? Why should you pay for her mistakes? She has plenty of money anyway. She is using you, Mammy – how do you not see that? You think she visits because she likes it here? Ha! I cannot allow you to be used like this, Mammy, I cannot—’
Aoife can hear her pitch rising, but her mother is no longer listening.
‘Yes,’ says Mammy, ‘yes, of course you are right, darling. My Fifi. Where did we get you from? But do that for me, darling. Make sure she is looked after.’ Then she pretends to fall asleep, and then she is really asleep, the snore pushing wet through her lips.
If nothing else, this little speech of Mammy’s has proven, as if there was ever a doubt, why Aoife is right to install the nanny cam. She kisses her mother’s forehead.
Well, that took no time at all. A ruckus of clucking from the back of the garden. What has Valerie done now?
‘Katie!’ she calls up the stairs, ‘Katie can you come down here please? We’ll need you to pack up the hens for my mother…’
27
BLACK THREADS CHART THE veins like poison ink. Sinéad slivers off the top and bores out
the core and uses the knife-tip to wheedle every streak of rot from the seeds and flesh. She puts the healthy green bits into a big stock pot and pours cider vinegar over them to kill any traces of mould. Fungus has invisible filaments that reach deep into tissue, breathing sickness into everything – fruit, meat, even flesh.
In July, she sprayed the tomatoes all over with a fungicide of startling turquoise and fed them with fertiliser. It was a stupid thing to do. The plants kept on going right through September, but she had created a little tragedy for herself out there. For weeks she watched the tired stalks push out more blossoms and fruit. She picked the tomatoes daily, and every single one was tainted with a soft, grey bottom before it grew ripe.
It was a relief to succumb to the autumn, ripping up the stalks by the cool light of dawn, laying the last of the fruit in a wooden crate and tossing the wiry plants into a big heap at the end of the garden – she will burn them, rather than risk infecting the compost heap.
Next year, she will steep the March nettles in hot water for a week, and then pour it into the prepared soil before planting her tomatoes. She found a blog that said rot could be prevented that way.
Rescuing the last of the tomatoes from decay has become an obsession. Sinéad hasn’t stopped working for hours; not for breakfast or a cup of coffee. She is intent on her task but she works clumsily, slicing into her thumb and fingers with the sharp steel knife – an old, wooden-handled knife with a silver hilt and a crooked, wire-thin blade that rusts if it isn’t dried well after washing. There’s a bitter satisfaction in the way the vinegar and the tomato juice send a searing pain into her arm when they enter the fissures in her skin.
She’ll try the nettle thing next year. Nettles are good for the kidneys – who told her that? When Sinéad was a child, her mother went out with her rubber gloves and gathered the first nettles of spring. She made meals with them – stuffed pillows of pasta, mud-coloured soup with nutmeg and black pepper and a swirl of milk. A long time ago now. They had less then; Mammy had to be careful what she bought. The nettles tasted like spinach, only spicier.
Only a few tomatoes to go. Tomorrow she’ll start on the chutney. Chutney is the only thing that can be made from underripe tomatoes. And jam. Green tomato jam.
She’ll have to finish up soon though; make herself presentable and prepare something for lunch. Her niece Valerie is arriving today with the hens.
*
Sinéad gave up on her own chickens three years ago, after the pine marten got the fat little black one, but she still has everything they need – a shed with nesting boxes and a run. She loved the little black one, and it really broke her heart to see it lying there with its speckled throat pulled open. This time she has nailed shut every tiny hole in the shed. She and Terence patched up the run themselves. It took two weeks to dig an extra barrier of chicken wire down deep into the soil, and her hips are still screeching from it. She will lock these hens up safely every night; she’ll be vigilant. She’ll keep them alive until Mammy is well again…
She has stale bread in the cupboard, does she? And chicken breasts in the fridge.
She’ll dress now in a minute, and maybe prepare a quick lunch for Valerie; something tasty and simple and maybe she’ll sit with her a bit and her niece can tell her things about being young in London. Sinéad does a great breaded chicken. It’s a long time since she’s made that. The secret is in the double dip – egg white, flour, egg white, breadcrumbs – and she puts a spoon of mustard and one of paprika into the egg, and a dollop of milk… that makes all the difference. That’s what she’ll make. Lovely.
*
Her mobile sounds. It’s Aoife. Sinéad puts it face down on the kitchen table. Watching it ring out, it’s a kind of heartbreak she feels. It is a kind of frustrated and hopeless and unworthy heartbreak; ‘Aoife,’ she says aloud. The word strains in her chest. She shakes her head, ‘Aoife,’ and sighs dramatically – a performance for no one. She has given up worrying about this new habit of talking to herself – she likes it; it feels like health to be able to make sounds and words that fit. ‘Aoife!’ – her throat is tender with the pain of it – her queasy regret for how her sister is now. For years at a time Sinéad could forget how she had laughed sometimes with her sister, how Aoife could be witty and light once. In those stretches of amnesia it was fine to listen to her sister’s rants and think, ‘Oh Aoife.’ But – was it the shock of the operation, or Mammy’s fall? But something has lifted her out of that kind of time, and the chubby nineteen-year-old Aoife, funny sometimes, warm even, rebellious and mischievous, is now palpably present, juxtaposed with the chronic bitterness and stiff rage of the woman at the end of the phone.
The ringing stops, and a text message comes in:
Mammy tired but fine. Ate a little.
Polish girl is stealing going to have to fire her
new girl available in a fortnight. Asian.
*
She stands on the stone steps, waving a tea towel at a shiny red Mercedes bus crunching up the gravel drive. She is surprised by a surge of affection when Valerie grins down at her from the driver’s seat, as though after a great achievement. Oh, but all that makeup, all that hair dye; poor Valerie. She has one of those faces that has never been girlish – shapeless eyebrows like her father, a rubbery nose, and, no matter how thin her body gets, she has Aoife’s heavy cheeks. When she was a toddler, Daddy painted a portrait of her called The Little Washerwoman, and he took to calling her that then, because of the dour, old face on her and the thick arms. The girl has little character to her face, no quirks; nothing that can tell a story. Perhaps that’s why she spent those years dressing in black and painting her face like a corpse – to make herself special, give herself character. It was terrifying – the white, white skin, black lipstick, corsets and all that garb. She called herself a goth. She would drive to Dublin in that little car Aoife bought her, to hang around Temple Bar, smoking. Poor Aoife. It was mortifying for her.
There is a residual morbidity about Valerie. She still wears a lot of black. She still dyes her hair black and wears very pale foundation but she is too sloppy-featured to look like a dying Victorian.
Valerie kicks the door open and puts a careful foot on the step leading down from the driver’s seat – Sinéad puts out a hand to help her and is struck by how feeble they both are: she middle-aged and bloated; Valerie limp-fingered, tiny on the waist and a nauseating whiff of sugary perfume off her.
‘Were you okay driving that thing?’
‘Not really.’ Her niece leans close and places a kiss on Sinéad’s cheek, touching her shoulder with a tenderness that makes a warm blush rise in her cheeks. That must be something she has picked up in London – Sinéad has never been on kissing terms with her nieces.
‘It’s Aunty Eileen’s…’
‘Why does she have a bus?’
Valerie shrugs and slides open the passenger door. The low, panicked cackle and err of frightened hens and a warm, dirty smell; the tang of their feathers, the powdery faeces under their claws. They have been inexpertly packed in cardboard boxes, which have been duct taped closed and pierced on top with a knife.
‘Six of them aren’t there?’
‘Yep. I have a big bag of grain and grit for you, too. Is Terence here?’
‘No. He’s visiting someone in England… the two of us will manage, Valerie!’
*
After their ordeal, the hens don’t enter the henhouse, but hunker down on the sparse grass. ‘They’ll be grand,’ says Sinéad. She throws a handful of grain through the wire and one of the hens stretches her scrawny neck in interest, then retracts it into her breast, puffing against the cold.
*
Sitting at the table in the dank back kitchen, Valerie looks painfully delicate – a large head wobbling on a little neck.
‘Can I help, Sinéad?’
‘No, no, stay where you are.’
As she moves back and forth, laying out plates and cutlery and condiments, Sinéad keeps
sneaking glances at the girl, hoping to soothe the guilt of her earlier observation by finding something beautiful in her face. ‘So why did Eileen buy a bus, do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Valerie, ‘she drove to our house in it and she said we could use it to move the hens. I don’t know why, I didn’t ask…’
‘You could have fit them in a car.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Well, a law unto herself is Eileen. Who knows why she does anything?’
Eileen came back into their lives dressed like a fifties teenager, full of intimate smiles as though the years of exile had never happened. Sinéad never hated her little sister the way Aoife did. She was only saddened by her parents’ grief over the things she did, their shame. But it makes her almost squeamish, the sudden cosiness between Aoife and Eileen; and this exhumation thing fills her with a delicious kind of terror, not least because she can’t resist her own pleasure in it. She is glad they tracked him down, glad they pulled him up and took charge; she can’t help it. It feels like an exorcism. It’s when she wakes in the night with her abdomen aching that she feels it most keenly – the exquisite satisfaction, the guilt, the genius of it; that her sisters could launch this irreproachable revenge on that little ghost. It never would have occurred to her that such a thing could be done.
Valerie picks at her nails. ‘So did Mammy tell you she’s fired the carer?’
‘Has she? Well I would have thought she’d talk to me first…’
Then again, what has it to do with Sinéad? She offered to split the cost of the carer with Aoife, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Don’t be a ninny, Sinéad, she said, Mammy will pay for it. She’s already signed the cheque. That made sense, of course, but something about it makes Sinéad uneasy.
‘Apparently, she’s been drinking Grandma’s expensive coffees – you know, the filter ones she gets in the Superquinn delivery? She gets the delivery on Monday – Mum arranged it – and apparently by Thursday there was only one coffee left…’