by Elske Rahill
‘Extras!’
Jem is not the number-one-fan of Uncle Pat.
Uncle Pat says in-this-house-we-eat-what’s-on-our-plate and tonight that was little C-for-Cat slices of celery with bumpy backs like green caterpillars and a caterpillar taste. Den saw him putting them under the edge of the plate and gave him a tissue to wrap them in and hide them in his pocket.
He stuffed the tissue sack of celery in one of his shoes before he buried them.
That was nice of Den. He was badly behaved to Den tonight. But Den is badly behaved lots of times.
*
He can hear his aunty and uncle coming up the stairs. Their talk is quieter now, but he can hear the words on the landing.
‘Your work,’ Uncle Pat is saying. He says it like ‘work’ is a pretend word, or a funny word. ‘It’s a hobby, Cara. How much do you earn an hour? It’s a hobby. You’ve never done a day’s work in your life…’
At home, when he can’t sleep, Mimi comes and turns his pillow so that his cheek is on the fresh side, and she puts a drop of oil on it from a tiny purple bottle that smells so nice and sleepy. His mammy doesn’t know about those things. It’s up to Jem now to turn his pillow when it gets all hot, and it’s all up to him to get to sleep; to think of nice smells and nice songs and dragons moving like clouds across his sky.
36
IT RAINED DURING THE night. Cara could smell it when she opened the front door; the fecundity of worms and roots, the sliminess of the leaves. This car attracts bug life. Her wing mirrors were swathed in spider webs, each invisible thread jewelled in rainbeads. There were four garden snails suckered to the wheel-cap, their shells cool as marbles under the vague sun. Denise insisted on pulling them off before she would get in the car for school. Poor snails.
Cara’s only just noticed the ladybird. It’s clinging to the dashboard, trembling along with the vibrations of the car. Any moment now its shell will snap open, revealing the little frenzy of wings beneath. That’s all it will take for the creature to be lost to some invisible nook of the car. Then it will turn up dead in the pocket of a door or the crease of a seat, compact and weightless as confetti, tossed in the dust with the copper coins. Thinking of that makes her feel weak and loose and sorry, like finding fragments of moth wing on the windowsill, or when her children tear open the buds of poppies, exposing the private twirling tissue of a flower that will never unfold.
The phone directs her calmly and clearly in a clipped English accent, but she keeps checking the screen with the same habitual glance she gives her mirrors, searching for the reassuring dot of her car pulsing along the roads.
While she drives, she plots the simple patterns of the ladybird – the blocky shapes for eyes and the funny little paddles of its feet. Poor mite must be drying out in here. She imagines it drinking a droplet of dew from a leaf or sliding down the side of the text in a big tear of rain, then pottering off onto the next page, two fat little domes of rain still on its back; and they splash off as it takes flight on the closing frame. She could work that into The Rainy Day Book…
The Rainy Day Book is a worry. ‘Make it your own,’ her agent said, but then they rejected the duck and asked for a boy and a girl instead. She was reluctant to accept the job in the first place, but she can’t back out of a commission, not with Pat working all the time, saving and saving as though shoring up against some terrible disaster. It hurts Cara, and makes her ashamed of him and then ashamed of herself for that betrayal, to see him undo the rubber band and count rolls of money into envelopes before stashing them under the floorboards like a greedy criminal. ‘It’s fine. We’ve nearly saved our target for this year. It’s fine…’ He’s started working weekends and evenings again – nixers here and there on the black to add to those envelopes.
‘It’s hard for men,’ is what Grandma would say. ‘Oh, it’s hard for men. They think they must control everything. They feel great burdens. Try to understand it’s hard for men.’
He opened her bank statement yesterday, and he went spare. But it only showed a bit of her overspending. He doesn’t know what she took out of her savings account for Denise’s violin. She isn’t supposed to touch that account.
It will be fine. She can move money over. She can tell him she’s getting a little less for this job, make it up that way…
She should get decent money for The Rainy Day Book. She hates it, though. It will involve illustrations of the various activities suggested for rainy days. They are stupid projects requiring double-sided sticky tape and craft tacks and pipe cleaners and all sorts of things that kids never have at their disposal. The editor emailed photographs of the finished products – characterless creations assembled by adult hands.
The GPS has led Cara into a little cul-de-sac beside a park and instructed her to drive through the house in front of her.
She will be late for this appointment, it seems, despite her best efforts. She is always late. Pat thinks it’s a feature of her personality that she likes to cultivate, but he’s wrong. She tries to be on time. She is ashamed of being late all the time, but still it happens. Parked in front of the angular new-build, she checks her emails to make sure she has put in the right address. She is left with no choice but to phone the woman and ask for directions. The thought of that makes her stomach flip and she rests her face on her palms and closes her eyes. The pregnancy sickness has started already. This time there seems no pattern to the waves of nausea. They come without warning, sweeping her into a useless heap when she least expects it.
She has been uneasy all day. This always happens to her if she doesn’t work well in the morning. It is something she withholds from Pat guiltily; her inability to enjoy anything unless she’s done some good work that morning. Pat – whose hands come back split clean to the tissue and angry with splinters, who works and works with his head bent until his neck aches, and then keeps working; who works only to support them all, to look after them – how would he feel, if he knew that she can’t bear any of it; the cooking and cleaning and driving, the nonsense the kids talk in the back of the car, the ridiculous squabbles?
If she has rendered a detail perfectly, or planned her layout, or any achievement at all, she can appreciate it all, she can take pleasure in every little thing – reading to the kids, listening to their jokes; cooking elaborate meals and eating them together around the table.
But on days like today it is all a hassle, pulling her away from what she needs to do. Everything slides away from her; half real, half formed. If she hasn’t been able to work, she thinks of nothing else. She sketches in her mind while her husband makes love to her; she pleasures him hurriedly, twitching with the need to put lines on paper.
Pushing her knuckles into her eyelids, she feels already as though she is in trouble for something – her own secret, wicked selfishness – thinking about nothing but silly scribblings.
A sensation like vomiting comes over her and she groans audibly, inhales as though this breath can suck her back together, and scrolls back to the email in her phone:
Dear Cara,
Thank you for getting in touch. I would like to meet with you to discuss your concerns. Please call me on the number below to arrange an appointment.
She almost hopes the woman won’t pick up. She can leave a voicemail saying she’s lost, then go home and put it all off until another day. It was the directness, perhaps, of the email, that made the whole thing seem so dramatic, and then the voice on the phone – dull, so very monotonous, as though weighed flat by the gravity of her job. But even as she wrote the enquiry, she felt the seriousness of what she was doing. A creeping fear set through her like something dropped into her blood. Once she has transgressed like this, there is no going back to the codes of family loyalty.
She hasn’t had a chance to talk about it properly with Pat. Freya is always there, and Freya can’t cope with what is happening with their aunts and their grandma and their mad mother.
Freya is like a child. She’s let this thing with Jem�
�s father get out of hand, and now she expects Cara to know what to do about it. She expects Cara to pick up all her broken pieces. Cara had to march her into the legal aid office and, as it turns out, ignoring him like that didn’t ‘do her any favours’. When it gets to court, they said, Freya will look unreasonable. She should have given him access as soon as he ‘expressed an interest’. It’s all Freya wants to talk about. She wants advice but she never takes it. It never occurs to her that Cara doesn’t know what to do either, that she is barely holding her own life together.
The call rings out, and Cara feels she has willed it that way.
With her nail, she nudges the ladybird very gently. It tucks its legs under itself. Then she remembers something – the matchboxes in the glove compartment! Denise has been collecting them for school. Her class is making a matchbox town or something. Children used to come to the door in the summer, selling matchboxes full of ladybirds for ten pence. Grandma bought them for the roses and gave the children a handful of Fox’s Glacier Mints as well as the money.
Cara slides open a matchbox and pushes it at the ladybird. The creature is still clamped up neatly, and it is easy to topple it into the box. She slides the cardboard closed and puts it in the door of the car.
Just as she is about to call and leave a voicemail, the phone rings. The woman sounds chirpier than she did last week. She says the GPS always gets them wrong, and they are back across the road, behind the church, that Cara will see the Health Service Executive sign on the gate of the car park. She is to ring the bell that says ‘Protection of the Elderly’.
37
MAMMY IS SEEN FROM far away, as at the end of a deep cave. Her home is a muffle of floral upholstery, tasseled lampshades, rugs. She is handed a glass. She lifts it to her lips, sends it away again. She tilts her head one way, then another. She sleeps. She is helped to her feet, brought away, settled back into her chair. Slippers are pushed onto her feet. She plucks limply at a ball of tangled wool.
Aoife’s eyes are growing weary. They struggle to pick out Mammy from the blocks of dark, the pixels of light. They slide away from the screen to the window, the filing cabinet, to the mousemat saying ‘O’Carroll, Sheehan & Co. Solicitors’.
Is she imagining it, or are there dark spots emerging there on the back of her hand; only faint speckles now, but they promise frailty, ugliness. She had her nails done only yesterday – Antique Rose. At the time she thought the muted colour dignified, understated. No, it’s an old lady colour.
Aoife skips forward: her mother fumbling with the remote control, her mother slumped to the side like a sack of sand.
She lifts her hand from the mouse, and the video slows to real time: her mother sleeping in her chair, her head tilted back and her mouth a fuzzy nothing. Someone comes in dressed in pale colours, stoops to looks at her, leaves.
Aoife needs a cup of coffee.
At first, she made sure to watch the video feed every day, fast-forwarding to appearances of the Ladies Muck, but it’s dreary work. The picture is not as good as she had hoped. The light is dim and the sound is useless – she can’t make anything out. It takes hours to process a day of footage, fast-forwarding through her mother sitting there and, at the side of the screen, a carer ensconced in her father’s chair, tapping at a smartphone.
They are paid to just sit there, basically.
But there’ll be something in here, she knows there will. It’s just a matter of persisting.
Aoife holds her breath. Someone is hunkering down beside Mammy – a bright mass of hair. Freya. She lifts her handbag and stands. Mammy looks up at her: what’s she saying?
This is it; Aoife can feel it. Ha! She’s caught her!
Her stomach lurches into her throat. Freya has put the handbag on Mammy’s lap; she is kissing Mammy’s cheek, and Mammy is saying something, leaning in, pointing – is she trying to defend herself?
Aoife pauses, rewinds. Yes. Of course, Freya is taking something from Mammy, but is it clear from the video? Not really. Using a biro, she notes down the date and time all the same. It might prove useful. She presses play. Freya leaves the room. Who is that off the side of the camera? A foot, maybe, a hand? The little boy. When did he come in? She must have skipped through his arrival. He approaches Mammy’s chair; his hair aglow, his eyes dark. He stands beside Mammy, a hand on her armrest, but she doesn’t seem to notice him. Freya returns to the room. She puts a cardboard box on the footstool, leaves again. Aoife might vomit with excitement – she has her! Ha! She has her!
Freya returns carrying something – a fat book. She places it in the box, right there in front of the camera, turns to Mammy, says something, and leaves. It goes on like that for seven whole minutes, Freya leaving the room and returning with more loot – a shoebox, a cylinder – slowly filling up the cardboard box.
Aoife pauses. She rewinds, watches it again to be sure. What a find! She is exhausted from it, exhilarated. Ha! She has her!
Leaning back against the kitchen worktop, the sunrise to her back, the kettle boiling, she dials.
‘Sinéad! Did I wake you? Well, you should be up. Listen. I’m going to email you something. I don’t think you’ll have any more scruples once you’ve seen this!
38
THE SOCIAL WORKER IS there at the door already, raising a hand and nodding.
She watches from the door as Cara parks badly, and re-parks, and gets out of the car. Cara walks towards her, making a half-wave of recognition, then stops – she has forgotten her purse and phone. Too far away to explain, she makes a pantomime of remembering these things, smacking her brow and shaking her head at her own silliness so that the woman understands why she is turning around.
Her palms are moist when the social worker shakes her hand – ‘Hi Cara. Bernie.’ – and leads her along a short corridor. Cara thinks of lie-detector tests, the way they measure anxiety levels and perspiration. It can’t be right, because telling the truth when nobody wants you to and no one might believe you – that is just as stressful, surely, as lying.
Bernie talks in a long, low monotone, like a background radio. She is only filling in the silence until they get to the office. Cara realises that she is barely aware of what the woman is saying.
‘Everyone has trouble finding the place. Everyone… It should be better signposted.’ She stops at an open door. ‘It’s an issue,’ she says, and gestures for Cara to step in.
The room is tiny, with filing cabinets on all sides. It smells sickeningly like air freshener. Cara stands back while Bernie squeezes past her and in behind a desk covered in stacks of cardboard folders. Isolated in the centre of the table is a single envelope-folder of dusty blue. There are dents and swirls in the corner where drying biros have been forced back to life. Bernie perches her bottom on the window ledge at her back, nods at Cara. ‘So…’
Cara takes a breath to speak, but exhales instead. Bernie doesn’t seem fazed. ‘Sit down,’ she says. ‘You can close the door if you like or – whatever you like.’ She is younger than she looked in the car park, not quite forty, perhaps, though up close, it is clear that the crease between her eyebrows is a deep and permanent fixture. She has abnormally dark, hurt-looking eye sockets. It’s as though someone has pressed a thumb under each eye until a groove has formed, bruising the flesh.
The door is being held open by a metal wastepaper basket. Cara shifts it with her foot, and the door falls slowly closed. She sits down on a swivel chair, too big and too luxurious for the little room, and too low. Her knees are higher than her hips. It will be an effort to get up.
That poor ladybird, tipped onto its back in the matchbox – has it managed to turn itself over yet? Has it even moved?
Cara heaves herself forward, so that she is sitting at the edge of the chair. It threatens to roll out from beneath her. She stands up again. ‘Maybe not,’ she says. ‘Sorry. I’m clumsy at the moment. Baby brain already!’ She rubs her abdomen and shrugs, as though it is not part of her at all, but a cumbersome attachment that she drag
s about reluctantly. She laughs and it sounds stupid.
‘You’re tiny!’ says the lady, raising her pitch and her eyebrows both at once, and smiling, relaxed suddenly. ‘I didn’t even notice you were pregnant… how far gone?’
‘Oh, nothing at all…’ Cara knows she isn’t showing. She doesn’t know why she mentioned it like that. ‘Like, eight weeks, I think… I just feel heavy,’ she says. ‘I’m starting to feel awkward.’
‘Well, congratulations. Is it your first?’ Cara loves this question. She laughs and tries to conceal her pride. ‘No! My fourth!’
‘Oh! Gosh, you don’t look like someone who has three kids!’
‘I started young. Youngish.’
‘So, I have your email here,’ says the lady, sliding open a drawer, as though the email is in there, and pushing it closed again, ‘and it seems as though you have reason to be concerned about your grandmother.’
Her eyes stretch open, and she blinks frantically. Cara realises that the woman is exhausted, that it is pure effort for her to stay alert; her patience is wilful, her sensitivity professional.
Grandad used to have so many flesh tones on his palette at one time, steely blues and burgundy reds, drops of linseed oil to keep them soft. When he covered the palette with clingfilm, the paint flattened – each glob of colour turning ugly, private; like the underside of a snail. She imagines turning her brush in a lovely sandy tone, glossy with oil and the colours not quite blended so that she mixes them on the canvas, the pinks and yellows merging into skin. She would make the social worker rested and pretty – add layers beneath the eyes, phasing out the purplish blue. It is something Grandad never would have done. It would be a lie.
The social worker offers only her dogged patience to the silence. Then a tiny, suppressed yawn swells her throat. She brings the back of her fingers to her mouth. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, ‘it’s been a long day. Ohhh.’ She allows an open-mouth yawn now, covering it with her hand. ‘Sorry. So, it seems to me that you have cause for concern?’