by Elske Rahill
‘You’ll like this chicken, Valerie. It’s years since I’ve made it so I hope I have it right…’
‘Oh. I’ll have a half a one, Sinéad. I’m not feeling the best…’
‘Okay. Well, taste it anyway.’
‘Thank you. That’s loads. Thank you. It looks lovely.’
‘So how are you getting on in London, Valerie? How long are you home for?’
‘Oh… well, I – I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m at really.’ The skin on her niece’s face is a green-white film of foundation, and very uniform in tone – but a terrible redness rises suddenly from her neck, making the makeup glow like a flimsy lampshade. ‘I had an abortion last week, and I just… I just wanted a rest then, after.’
‘Oh.’ Sinéad looks at the ketchup bottle – the brown-red scab around the cap. Her niece’s presence has exposed the filth in every nook of her kitchen, the grimy smells in it. She looks at the kitchen floor – in the dip of a cracked tile, a little triangle of dust and fluff and muck. She stopped trying to clean this house years ago.
She cannot look at the girl. Is it so normal now, that thing? Is it such a normal thing that people mention it over lunch? Valerie makes it sound like something that just happened to her; there’s self-pity in her voice but not a hint of culpability.
‘What does your mammy think of that?’
‘Oh, she doesn’t know. Don’t tell her will you please? She’s a bit stressed at the moment, I don’t think she’d really approve…’
‘Is it because you’re not married?’
One side of Valerie’s mouth lifts in a grin and she gives a breathy little laugh. ‘Not exactly, Aunty Sinéad… sort of, not exactly…’
Things have changed a lot. When her sister Eileen got pregnant – well, that was decades ago. The eighties, was it? The nineties? They are women now. Cara must be almost thirty, and the little one into her twenties… Eileen’s pregnancies were terrible scandals but there was no talk of abortion. Lily has been duped is what Mammy said, but had she been? Don’t make a spectacle of yourself, that’s what Mammy said to them when, as children, they misbehaved: You’re making a spectacle of yourself, or You’re making a show of me. But Eileen always loved to make a show. When the musician fellow died, Eileen seemed almost to enjoy her grief and the great humiliation of the whole thing. His ugly old bitch of a wife drove me from the funeral… those nasty little shits won’t even acknowledge their half-sisters… and so on. She must have known he was married. She must have. Oh, Daddy took that all very hard.
‘I see, well… Are you okay?’ says Sinéad. What does her niece want from her? Kissing her cheek, touching her shoulder like that, telling her this terrible, terrible thing.
‘Oh yes, it was fine actually. It was really simple – I just took the tablets and then it was just like a bad period. They have to monitor you for a bit, you know, in case it doesn’t work – if it doesn’t work they have to go in and take it out. I was really afraid of that. But it worked. It was fine actually. I just feel a bit tired now. I feel like I need to take stock… I shouldn’t have let it happen, of course. Stupid. Imagine being so stupid…’
‘Well. That’s good. Good that they didn’t have to go in. What age are you now, Valerie?’
‘Twenty-nine,’ she says, running a fingertip over the tarnished tines of an old silver fork. ‘Twenty-nine.’
*
Valerie isn’t touching her food. The food that Sinéad planned and so carefully prepared. Instead, she’s picking at a patch of thick polish on her thumbnail. She rips off a big flake and it takes a sheath of nail with it. Something sore and unkind is gathering in Sinéad’s belly – it’s her niece’s presumptuousness, sitting there at her table, telling her this – the unfaltering voice, the – what is it, what is it that’s making a terrible rage fill Sinéad’s belly, her chest, her skull? – entitlement. Entitlement is what it is; as though all these choices are hers to make. ‘So stupid,’ repeats Valerie, inviting Sinéad to contradict her. What right has Valerie to tell her this? She is implicated now, in this terrible thing, because she cannot stop her compassion for the girl anymore than she can stop her rage. What is the girl doing? Living over there in London, having careless intercourse and disposing of the consequences? Choosing to tell her this terrible thing, and not eating the food that Sinéad took such care to make for her?
‘… I was there crying away in the surgery, you know, looking at this tablet – you take one the day before, so like, there’s no going back actually, and then you go in and take another two – one orally and the other up there, you know?’
‘No,’ says Sinéad, ‘I don’t know about those things. I didn’t know that. This is – this is all stuff we knew nothing about, growing up.’ No doubt Valerie will have children in the future, as soon as she wants to, no thought for the miracle of it at all.
‘Well that’s what it is, anyway, and she was really lovely, the lady. It’s an Irish thing, I suppose, there’s a bit of a stigma still, isn’t there? The lady said it’s normal. She said, like, it’s not only Catholic and Muslim girls who find it hard, your body finds it hard too; your body has one idea, and you have another. “There’s no great choice in this situation,” she said, “only a better and a worse choice.” And that made sense to me. I felt better then. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Sometimes there are no nice choices, only less bad ones.’
Sinéad realises she’s been holding her breath, afraid to break whatever spell is making Valerie talk like this. She exhales slowly, and touches her brow, dizzy with revulsion. What a world. What a world this is.
It was something she thought about a lot, after that last pregnancy. She could lie awake relishing the memory of those images she had seen on Grafton Street – for years there were a pair of unwashed old ladies to be seen shuffling up and down, holding pictures of aborted foetuses – and she wished she had seen her miscarriage when it came out; she wished they had shown it to her so she could have known what it looked like, how big it was, whether it had the right number of heads or finger nubs or whatever; why it had just stopped like that.
The hysterectomy was over twenty years after that last miscarriage, but it started her wondering again. The evening she got home without her womb, she went on the internet to find out what had happened back then, but there were no answers. She looked up ‘nine-week-old foetus’ on Google Images. The pictures she got were nothing like those posters – a nine-week-old foetus was a hard-looking little prawn of a thing, all gristly spine with seeds for eyes. She looked at picture after picture of the little globs. One of them was lying on a woman’s palm – it was no bigger than her thumbnail but there was a tiny knitted hat on its head and a tiny knitted blanket around it. Sinéad couldn’t believe that there were knitting needles so small. All that was visible of the foetus was a pinkish jelly bump with those blind black eyes in it.
*
Valerie finally eats her half chicken breast, and then accepts the second half, dipping each forkful in a little heap of ketchup. Then Sinéad makes a pot of tea and Valerie talks and talks. She tells her every detail – the pregnancy test and the first appointment at the abortion clinic, and the way the blood looked when it came out. Although Sinéad can do nothing but sit in bamboozled silence and pour tea, Valerie thanks her for listening.
‘Why didn’t you have children, Sinéad?’
‘It never happened,’ says Sinéad. ‘Barren, I suppose. They can do things for you these days – things if you don’t want it, and things if you do. Interventions. Back then it was the luck of the draw.’
‘So, you would have liked children?’
‘I thought I’d have them. I used to talk about it, before I got married. Three girls and a boy.’
*
After that last miscarriage she had bad days, when all she could do was drive to her mother’s house and stand, weeping on the doorstep. What if they got it wrong Mammy? What if the machine was broken? The first few times, her mother held her, rubbed her back, wip
ed her cheeks, but then she grew impatient: Pull yourself together, she said, and; You’re not the first disappointed woman in the world! You think miscarriage is the worst thing that happens to women? Grow up child! Grow up my girl. She behaved foolishly for those months; her mother was right.
Nowadays people start babies in their forties, but back then thirty-six was old enough to be called barren. After they had taken the last miscarriage out of her, the word clung; whispering in her skin and glaring out from the great sanitary napkins they sent her home with – huge long, fat things, sterile white. It was the word on her dry palms and tremble-tender belly: barren. She was barren now.
She had lost pregnancies before but that last time was different – no spotting, no cramps; and three periods missed. The morning of the appointment she had vomited four times. Everyone said that was a good sign; she had been so sure of herself that she had even told Aoife about it. Once, resting on her back in bed, she had felt it ripple under her skin – could that be true? Or was it a lie that had come into its own?
Truth or trick, she remembers how it felt – soft petals, tiny fleshlet skimming quick as light beneath her surface.
It was the first time she’d made it to the twelve-week mark, but at the hospital they said it had probably been dead for weeks. They said it was her head keeping it in. Now that she knew it was over, it would start to come out.
But a week later her belly was so swollen she couldn’t wear trousers, and even on the way to the appointment Terence had to pull over three times so that she could vomit onto the road. She felt sure they had made a mistake. Mistakes happened. When they went in with their metal tools and scooped it out of her, one of the nurses would spot a tiny fairy-child, wriggling there in the bright bucket, and they would know they had made a mistake but it would be too late. That’s not the kind of thing they’d ever tell you, of course; they would never say sorry.
They’ve made a mistake, she said. Terence, they’re wrong; they’ve made a mistake.
That must have been hard on Terence. It must have frightened him to see her eyes wild like that, the frothy yellow bile coming up out her lips. He said it was just because she was fasting – she always felt sick when she fasted – and the hormones could be making her paranoid.
He was right, of course he was right. After listening with the trumpet and shaking her head, the nurse made her an appointment to see a man with an ultrasound machine. Then Sinéad had seen it herself there on the screen, a little black shadow, no bigger than the last one. The man pushed and pushed with the scanner on her belly, but the shadow was stubbornly still, stubbornly dark; ingrained like a stain into the fabric of her. The man switched on the sound, searching for a heartbeat. It sounded like being under water; the whoosh of her own body, nothing more.
Who did she think she was fooling? Inside her it sounded like an empty sea. There was nothing in her that could emerge to a new thing. Me, she thought. I am full only of me.
The man switched off the sound. Terence touched her hand but she flinched to a fist.
She’d had a dilation and curettage before – a ‘D and C’ is what it was called – and lots of women had them. It would give her the best chance, said the doctor, of conceiving again.
She had to bend into the foetal position, and an elderly nurse with a Donegal accent stroked her arm. ‘Think of something nice, darlin.’ All the nice she could think of, though, was the little baby booties she had allowed herself to crochet, the tiny tumble of creation; a whole flower-fish world unfurling inside her.
*
When her niece has left, Sinéad stands in the drizzle, fingers hooked in the wire fencing, watching the hens waggle their bottoms into the soil. She listens to the creaky sounds they make. They still haven’t entered the henhouse.
She tries to call Terence, but he’s not picking up. She realises very suddenly, with a mixture of relief and terror, that she is alone in the world. In her waterproofs and wellingtons, she makes her way down the sludgy field to the boathouse, where she places her mobile phone on the table and pours herself a whiskey.
There is a low wind starting, and the lake meets the windows in dark, mulchy sloshes. A small croak escapes from her throat, then a long, high whimper bouncing off the walls of the little boathouse, the low ceiling. She is alone out here. There’s nothing alive in the water. Everything has gone south.
Even the eels are gone.
Terence says eels are mysterious. No one knows how they mate. They are all born somewhere in the sea, beneath impassable waters. They go there to mate and they go there to die in cool, deep privacy.
The dark lake tongues at the glass. Rain pecks at the roof.
Mammy is going. It has already started; she is ebbing out.
28
SOMETIMES DENISE OPENS THE violin case just to smell the caramel wood and the lump of rosin like a warm forest. That is what she’s doing when her mammy says it’s time to go. She loves when it’s time to go to music because they sit in the car – just Den and Mammy – and they can listen to whatever tapes they want or no tapes at all.
But when Denise comes downstairs with her violin on her back, Mammy says, ‘You need your musicianship folder too Denise; it’s Saturday.’ On Saturday, Denise has musicianship class before real violin class. Denise hates musicianship class because of the singing-all-together and the sore benches that hurt her bum. She likes real violin class which is just her and her teacher and their violins.
Denise plays best when her violin teacher, Mo, is listening. It’s a kind of magic, being in that room with Mo. Mo casts a spell, like she’s giving Denise all of her brain energy for playing. Practising at home is not the same. Her little sister Megan is three, and she doesn’t like the violin. If she hears the sound of it, she puts her hands over her ears and screams. Daddy says that’s just because the sound confuses her on account of her ears are glued and she needs grommets.
Just when she is about to say no to musicianship class, her mammy’s phone rings and when she picks up she clutches the phone to one ear and puts a finger on her other ear and frowns, and says, ‘Okay, okay Grandma, I’m coming. Yes. I’m coming now.’
Mammy runs upstairs herself for the musicianship folder, telling Denise to hurry into the car. Then she kisses Daddy and talks quickly and quietly to him, and she pulls Denise’s jacket on her so quickly that the sleeves of her jumper stuff up at her elbows, and she rushes her into the car and starts driving without checking that Denise is strapped in and with no tapes playing and she says, ‘We’re in a hurry now, Den; we need to go to Mimi first.’ Maybe she will be late for musicianship. That would be good.
In the back of the car there is the amazing-and-beautiful necklace that Denise made in school. It took her loads of days to make it, because she could only paint one side of the pasta at a time. When they were all dry, she put them on a ribbon. Some people in her class didn’t do it right, even though Ms Dowling said about patterns and they all practised patterns on paper. Denise’s one is amazing-and-beautiful and Ms Dowling said it was perfect and pretty. It is a three-pattern: blue pink yellow; blue pink yellow. Denise checks every piece again, to make sure that it really is amazing and beautiful and perfect and pretty, before stuffing it into the pocket of her tracksuit bottoms.
When they get to Mimi’s house, there is a blue van in the drive, and they have to park outside the garden wall, with the car half on the pavement and half on the road. Mammy says, ‘Wait in the car, I won’t be long,’ and Denise doesn’t whinge to go in. Mammy shuts the door very hard and hurries towards the house. Denise watches her disappear around the gate, but very soon Mammy comes back and opens the back door and says, ‘Actually you better come on in, Den – your Mimi would love to see you. Sorry, chicken, I’m not with it. Sorry, my darling. Everything is okay.’
Mammy knocks at the window and Mimi’s minder comes to the door with her white-plate face and yellow hair and stands back to let Mammy and Denise into the hall. Denise holds Mammy’s leg. There is a new sm
ell in Mimi’s house. It is a smell like opening a new toy – sweet and clean and a bit poisonous – and Denise knows there are strangers in the good room because she can hear them talking and banging things.
‘They’re replacing the carpet,’ says the lady, and her face is serious.
‘Did Grandma organise it?’ asks Mammy.
‘No, no of course not, Cara. She’s very confused and frightened by all the traffic in the house. I’ve shut the doors and tried to keep it from her… It was Aoife. Aoife has organised a new carpet and new furniture… she had Mrs Kearney write the cheque.’
Denise doesn’t want to let go of Mammy’s leg, but she does want to see, so she creeps very quietly to the good-room door and looks in. There is a big ghost sheet over the dining-room table and the other big things and they are together at the end of the room, and all the walls are naked and the big friendly clock is gone from the corner, and there are men pulling up the carpet and under is just slices of dusty wood.
‘Oh, it’s a big job,’ says her mammy behind her.
Denise pushes herself back into her mammy’s legs, and she feels her mammy’s hand on her chest and she clings onto her fingers. The nice lady is talking quietly. Denise loves the strange shapes of her words.
‘… Cara, I am sorry but I need to talk to you; this is not the only thing. Aoife is coming with papers for her to sign – every few days there is something. I don’t know what they are, but your grandmother doesn’t know either and it’s – it’s not ethical. She becomes very anxious and distressed. She writes cheques for Eileen. All night she was talking about a trust fund? She has dementia, but your aunts refuse to get a diagnosis… I’m sorry, but I can’t witness it all and not say anything. You have to do something to protect your grandmother. If it was my grandmother, I wouldn’t stand by…’
*
Mimi looks very big in her chair. There is a fire going and the air is squiggly with the heat coming out of it. She looks a bit like a king, on account of how her hands are holding the arms of her chair, and no smile on her face, and the way she lifts her head very slowly. Her mouth is all tight and small, and her eyebrows curled and white; she looks different. Denise puts her hand into her pocket and feels for the amazing-and-beautiful necklace.