by Elske Rahill
‘They were just here you know. What was it they told me? Did I give you money once?’
‘Yes,’ says Cara, ‘you helped us with a deposit for the house.’
‘Aha. So they say…’
Grandma taps out the pace on the arm of the chair. This is a test of some sort, and Cara doesn’t know the answer.
‘That was years ago, Grandma.’
‘Yes. And stupid goose you didn’t know better than to tell them.’
‘Tell who?’
Her grandmother continues to drop her fingers, slowly, one by one on the armrest.
‘I thought you had the sense to keep that quiet. Fifi was put out. She is always like that, doing the sums, my Feefs. And Sinéad always following along like a stupid pup. Well, Aoife has all the bank records and there she is going through it with a red pen. Now they make me sign cheques here and cheques there. They say I was not fair – the things we bought to look after you. They want to make everything just. Just… My Fi – where did I get her? Has life been so unfair on her, after all? Did they sell my house?’
‘I don’t know, Grandma.’
‘Don’t lie to me, darling, you of all people.’
‘I really don’t know, Grandma.’
‘I think they did you know. I think I signed. I think they sold that house we bought, me and Daddy. And the mews where he worked, I suppose that too… I think I signed just now. They were here just now. I think I signed. You will find out, will you? And tell me?’
Cara nods. Grandma sighs and shuts her eyes and the tapping reduces to an angry twitch of her knuckles. Her mouth makes a little twisting spasm and she says, ‘Have they no shame?’
Cara holds the hand still. ‘Relax, Grandma,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t matter now. Relax.’
Grandma looks at her like a scolded child, eyes wide and wet. ‘They have no shame,’ she says. ‘How is it that they have no shame?’ and her head jiggles and falls back against the headrest. Cara rubs the hand – the pasty palm and then the front, where the skin folds like clingfilm, too moist and too white, and blotched with soft brown spots like the ones that blister on pancakes.
‘Oh dear, Cara. Can you help me? Is there a toilet somewhere?’
‘Let’s go back to your room, Grandma.’
*
Cara loves her grandmother’s big white knickers. They are the same ones she has always bought for Cara – ‘to protect your kidneys’. They cover the whole bum and reach the belly button. Cara leaves them scrunched in piss on the floor while she cleans Grandma’s legs with wet wipes, and helps her into new ones. ‘This foot now,’ she says, rubbing the long, sinewy shin.
Cara pulls the big pants up over Grandma’s groin, her hips, her navel. Cara’s throat clogs. Her belly button; the place they tied before severing Grandma from her mother. Perhaps they taped cotton and a penny over it, the way Grandma did with Denise and Megan and Peig, to prevent a hernia or an ‘outy’. The ripe little knot could be a toddler’s, though the skin around it is puckered and dragging. It must have popped outwards with each of Grandma’s pregnancies to become a sensitive little dome of a thing, the weakest point in the fortress of her great belly.
‘Oh Cara, wouldn’t you be ashamed?’
‘No, Grandma,’ says Cara, ‘I wouldn’t be ashamed. Didn’t you change our nappies for years?’
That was the wrong thing to say. Cara meant to remind her that like her she is a woman, like her she is a mother, like her she is well equipped to deal with piss and blood and shit.
‘But I know how you feel. Oh Grandma, they had to clean me up when Megan was being born. I was so embarrassed…’
But her grandmother cannot listen any more to stories like this; stories of birth that might bind them as women, sweep disgrace into pride. Narrative doesn’t fit into the new shapes of Grandma’s mind.
Cara changes Grandma’s skirt and puts her slippers on. She rolls up the wet clothes and pushes them into a plastic bag. When she comes out of the en suite, cupping Grandma’s elbow, Megan is sitting on the bed, holding the remote control.
‘Tan I make it go up and down?’ she asks, and, picking up a piece of knitting – a stringy strip of acrylic yarn, hardly held together, all dropped stitches and uneven rows – ‘What’s Mimi making?’
‘I don’t know, baby. No, don’t touch the control.’
Cara helps her grandma to move slowly towards the bed. She is going to be late for Denise; she really is going to be late now. The old lady pauses. Balancing carefully with one hand on Cara’s shoulder, she touches her sparse hair, straightens her skirt and smoothes a hand over her bottom. She sighs and composes herself and suddenly her features rearrange and she has her own face again. Then she continues the slow journey to bed.
When she is lying on her back, she breathes out, and squeezes Cara’s hand. ‘Cara,’ she says, ‘I need to tell Daddy. Tell him – will you? He’ll know what to do. I don’t want to frighten you chicken, but I have dreams – our little boy… Tell Daddy, will you? I had a dream we lost him. He needs to watch him. You’ll tell him, won’t you?’
‘It’s okay.’
‘Okay? Are you mad? No, Cara, it’s not okay. You have to tell him. Did you never have that, Cara, where you dream a thing that’s going to happen?’
‘I’ll tell him, Grandma.’
Then her grandmother looks distracted, as though she has just realised something. Her face grows harsh and masculine in a way that Cara has never seen before, some stiff resolve in her straight mouth. Her voice is low and certain.
‘Send the child out,’ she says.
Cara doesn’t like leaving Megan alone. She sends a message quickly, asking Freya to get Denise, then hands Megan her phone and tells her to sit at the door and not to move, and that she can play the ‘Acorn Maths’ in the phone.
‘I have to go soon, Grandma,’ she says, ‘but I’ll be back… and maybe Freya will come in, if she can. Can you try to rest?’
‘Cara,’ she says, ‘I changed the will, you know.’
‘Don’t worry about that, Grandma.’
‘Do you hear what I’m telling you? You won’t be short.’
‘I have everything I need, Grandma. Don’t worry… We all have everything we need.’
‘Well, did you ever? Wouldn’t you be ashamed?’
‘No. I wouldn’t be ashamed—’
‘Will you get me something, Cara? Get me some pills?’
‘I’ll ask the nurses, but I don’t think it’s time for your tablets… are you in pain?’
‘Stupid goose. You know what I mean. Something to finish it.’
Cara kisses her temple. ‘Rest, Grandma.’
‘I am counting on you, chicken. Get me some pills.’
‘The nurses will give you your pills…’
‘I see.’ Grandma nods. She makes a clicking sound with her mouth, and it’s that look again – nasty, sneering – but this time Cara recognises it. It’s the face Grandma made once when Cara lied to her about smoking – a face that says, You have crossed the line. You have disappointed me now and nothing will ever be the same…
‘Well I thought you were a brave girl. I thought you had guts, you of all people. You don’t get used to this, you know. You don’t understand, but you will. I don’t usually ask things of you, do I darling? Do I ever ask things of you? Get me what I am asking, Cara. You’re a good girl. I’m counting on you to do it.’
44
IT HAPPENED TO MOLLY once, on her first pregnancy. She was walking up to their little apartment. She still had a cough that had dragged on from winter into spring, and it caught her suddenly, there on the stairs. She stopped with her hand on the banister and the shopping basket over her other wrist. It was a high, tickly cough – nothing dramatic – and it happened, just like that. She only felt a little release – oh, but the relief – and she squeezed her thighs together but as she stood there she wet herself so completely that it pooled in the sole of one shoe. It wasn’t the waters. She knew that. She cont
inued up the stairs and into the flat, carrying the basket with onions and a very expensive cauliflower. She washed by the basin and put on her other skirt. Then she soaped and rinsed her soiled clothes, and then she went out and cleaned up the little trail on the steps and no one ever knew.
That was her little boy she was carrying. That didn’t happen with the girls. The girls were different altogether. She was sicker with the girls, but she didn’t wet herself.
She should feel relief, yes; she should allow the things her body is doing now. After her little boy was born, she enjoyed bleeding helplessly into the big brown cotton towels. She enjoyed every messy thing her body did – the milk staining the sheets, the syrup smell of her sweat.
But this fills her with panic instead, the piss creeping slowly into the bed, onto her thighs. She could enjoy being lazy, pissing into the big nappies like her own Grandma did; if it wasn’t for the people who trick her and profit from her. The nurses who change their hair every day – sometimes candy-pink ribbons and sometimes blonde, trying to make a fool of her so that she doesn’t know their names and they laugh at her; they chuckle at the things she says and it isn’t kind.
And she has been a fool, because – Aoife explained it all – Cara, who she had loved, Cara wanted to profit from her. She had given things to Cara, things she doesn’t even remember giving her, and now Cara is saying she is mad. Now Cara wants her chequebook removed. Cara wants her in a madhouse with the halfwits. Aoife explained it all and asked, ‘Do you understand, Mammy?’ And then the man too, Aoife’s husband who is a solicitor and very respectable, he came and explained it all to her. She has been tricked, horribly tricked. She signed a thing that was not just. But she can correct it. They are sorting it out. Dinny would not have been so foolish, but he will not be angry when he gets here because he has been away for so long.
Her Aoife is old now, with a frown and hurt red daubed across her cheeks and nose; jaded from a life sitting pretty. More power to her to have all that money and that nice house and a husband you can rely on and nothing to do but enjoy it. Except that she is sad, her Fifi. Sad from nothing. And didn’t they give her all she could need and she shouted today, whooping like an alien thing, telling off the nurses – poor little girls who try their best and they far from their mothers. One of them with a name like you never heard but Molly likes it – Precious – but she says she puts her name Paula on her curriculum vitae because, though they don’t let on, the Irish have become a closed people where once they were welcoming. Precious has a grandmother back home in Nigeria who raised her and is old now and needs medicine and company. Imagine that she is looking after Molly instead of her own grandmother. Molly knows how that shame would feel, how it would make you squirm and bristle and how it could turn you sharp after time.
Her Aoife makes her ache; the way her looks betray something haggard and wrong in her. A bitter thread pulling through her, twisting her face and her high, tough shoulders, where she was soft and fatty and silly once, chubby wrists on her hips and buttery rolls on her legs and the fur up the back of her neck that Dinny could kiss and smile about. Our little piggledy poo.
How could that be her Fifi, who left in an angry flapping, all business, and her bag with many buckles? She needed to see her beautician about her skin, for she had a terrible case of red face that had finally been diagnosed.
Molly is glad to be left in peace here in her bed, but lonely too. Lonely is the word she has been searching for and she is glad she found it now. She will say it aloud, maybe, next time she has a visitor. She will say it to Cara. ‘I am lonely, Cara.’ Lonely without Dinny.
She needs them to close the curtains to make the night go away and she has pain but she cannot tell them where for it feels to be coming from inside all of her and from a great, deep place that was always there. She never liked pills. They were always pushed on her while she refused but now she wants them and no one will come. When she is at home she brews her own cures for things with plants and alcohol. The bitters take so long to ferment in the hot press and she has to turn the bottle clockwise every ten days. But now the garden is all dried up, so she needs some pills to blot out all this aching Aoife makes in her with her frown. And Lily. Lily with her far-apart eyes and shrieking and her ideas. What was that word she found for her?
Dinny can laugh at Molly sometimes, for being a queer one and spooky with her potions. Of course, her Granny Casey was a witch with tarot cards and a poison-yellow soup for a missed monthly and though those were dirty things to know it was because the motherline was dark. Tinkers once, with black hair. She was not like that with her clever head… Oh, her hands. Molly’s hands are a fright – spots on them like toad-skin. Was it work made them that way? Washing up and that? And not wearing gloves for the cleaning on account of she can’t stand the smell of rubber on her after. Sister Celestine’s skin was always so silky and cool when she took your hands in hers and spoke gentle, and Mam was angry when Molly cried and said she would miss Sister Celestine’s hands, for no one’s touch was so soft: Well wouldn’t my hands be soft too, praying all day and never a cup to wash or a nappy to scrub, never an onion to chop…
Cooking, Molly doesn’t mind. Cooking is another thing altogether. She is never hungry for she tastes as she cooks and then she can sit and eat very little with Dinny and the children and it does not disturb her to go back and forth, serving. She could eat now, she thinks. That lovely quiche that Cara makes – such a clever little thing and how she finds the time Molly couldn’t tell you – a sweet and salty buttery quiche she makes with tomatoes and cheese on the top like an Italian thing. Why didn’t Cara come with the quiche? Too busy with the children, she would say; too busy looking after the children and here is Molly ringing and ringing on the bell that will make Cara come. Ringing and ringing and Cara must hear but she is too busy and it is hard not to be angry but she is a good girl thinking always of her children. Molly pulls the bell again. She will wait. If Cara does not come soon with the quiche and the tablets she will phone her.
She doesn’t feel like today is the day that Dinny will come. It will not be today so she needn’t worry about her hair and all that, and her fingernails are clean anyway, even if Freya has not painted them for her. She will ask Freya to do her eyebrows because that makes a big difference. She cannot greet Dinny with white eyebrows like a mad old witch and Freya does such a good job with a little bit of colour and sometimes a scissors to trim.
Dinny laughs at her because she could be spooky before, knowing things before they happened; knowing a letter would arrive before it did or that someone was expecting or dead or—
But it was not always nice to know things. That time the little Reilly girl died and the father came to the pub, a face on him like a thing being dragged up a washboard and when Dada came to tell them, it was she told him – for she had seen it all. As she sat on the step making socks by the streetlight she had seen what her dada was seeing in the pub with the poor man’s face and the other men looking at him and knowing it was too bad to ask.
A queer thing, that, the sort of thing her grandmother knew about but Molly did not want to learn it. So queer and out of order that she went to a priest – she who had such unsteady faith – and asked him to take it out of her and the priest looked frightened and he put his hands on her head and mumbled but still it kept on so that when she dreamed of their little boy stretched out on a table and she saw his lovely face thick like dough and his lips draining, she woke crying and could not drive it from her mind and she knew it would happen for she had felt for some time that it was too nice to be real; being together with enough to eat and loving each other and their beautiful little boy and Dinny kissing her back at night and putting his arms around her and everything nicer than she could have imagined. And Dinny had been frightened too, when she told him, and then when it happened how was it that he didn’t blame her? Or is that it? Is that why she hasn’t had a word from him now for weeks and weeks?
Her arm hurts. What has she
been doing, clenching the bell like a mad old bat, her hand dead from hanging upright. What is she like? She should be ashamed to be this way. She cannot let Cara see her this way, though they have been summoned and will be here soon with the quiche and the nail polish, and what will they think of Molly whose bosom is not soft and welcoming the way they know it, but all tired now and knobbled under her nightie?
After he was born she fed him all night, sitting in a chair and savouring every moment of his living. So maybe she had known then too – in the first days after his birth – that he would not be long on this earth, for them who had lived had never kept her up like that with the miracle of themselves, drinking all of her into the rise and fall of his breathing and his lips like his father’s and his fingers splaying like little blades of moonlight, and the nails so tiny and every detail of him complete so that she could not sleep for wonder—
People thought she might feel guilty for it but she could not, for it was she who had been wounded. He would never have thought he would die and there was no terror in his eyes, just confusion perhaps, and indignation, as he waited for her to help him for she did not scream – she did not want to scare him – but made soothing sounds and told him he was alright while she banged his back to bring it up but instead that banging must have knocked it down and made him die – that’s what people thought – for you should punch the belly of a choking child, not bang the back and she should have known that but she didn’t but she was puzzled too, while she did it, a little angry even, for he was a clever child and it was not like him to do a thing like he did – reaching into the bowl of soaking beans for he knew better. But had she told him not to? She hadn’t told him not to and she had left it there and was it on purpose she had done that, to atone perhaps for things she half knew?