by Elske Rahill
And tomorrow Freya has this court hearing. Pat has to take the afternoon off to bring Denise to her recital, because Freya is insisting Cara goes with her. Apparently, she won’t even be allowed into the hearing with her, but Freya wants her there anyway.
There is so much worry she could have. She has to quieten it all so that the day-to-day can go on; she has to ignore all the terrible beauty of her children and the quivering of her own heart, a fragile thing perched on every nuance of them, if she is to stay whole.
Peig is closing her eyes; another jagged little gasp. Her Peig, with the fat pout and tears beading her thick lashes. Peig, who wants only to hold Cara’s hand while she drifts to sleep.
Nothing can hurt you as much as your children. No one could hurt her, if it wasn’t for them. They are her weakness.
If there was – sometimes she can’t help thinking of it – if there was a war and they did that thing where they made her choose which of her children would die, what would she do? God, what would she do? The baby. She would let them take the baby. Because she would go stupidly, never for a moment believing she had been forsaken, all the while knowing that Cara was with her, that she would save her. Until she died, Peig would never know her mother had betrayed her, but the others would feel the hurt of her choice, so, yes, take the baby she would tell them.
The foetus turns – a thrill every time, the shape of it striving into being, striving to be a thing not her, and she puts her hand on the ripple it makes beneath her skin. Peig the already-baby opens her eyes, grasps for the hand, pushes her lips between the bars of the crib and kisses Cara’s fingertips, a sweet wet little kiss that she has learned from all the kisses she has been given.
*
Pat snores. Before he fell asleep, he muttered, ‘Your sister.’
‘Freya?’ Freya is beautiful. She really is. Cara was amazed she’d never thought of it before – that Pat might think about Freya that way.
‘Your sister takes the piss.’
‘Freya?’
‘Never puts her hand in her pocket.’
Now he turns towards her in the bed. He worries in his sleep. His brow crinkles and his fist rises, the thumb lifting. He builds things in his dreams – a house for them, a roof, a crib for the new baby – he bangs her hip with his dream-hammer. Cara shifts away from him. If she wakes him, he will only be frustrated that he didn’t finish. He will carry the unease with him all through tomorrow.
The landing light has been left on, but Cara is too tired to get up and turn it off. She can hear the fan whirring in the neighbour’s en suite. She feels sick. It’s the pregnancy, and all that burnt butter, and nostalgia for the long-haired, dark-eyed artist Pat was before, his hands running over the clay the way they ran over her shoulders and hips. Nostalgia for those shoulders and hips – how easy her body was then, how lean and singular.
She turns to face him; in his sleep he is scowling. He looks hurt. He looks bewildered. The nausea creeps into her throat. She turns onto her back. The baby shifts about, flipping Cara’s stomach, creaking her ribs. She is sick with – what? Gratitude. Gratitude for having someone to love her children and look after them like that, and sick with guilt, because it is not the same for her – she has to work. She wouldn’t love them if she didn’t draw. Stupid. Such a stupid, vain thing.
Pat’s arm twitches again. He lifts his hand, shakes his head, opens his mouth and makes a huge snore. His anxiety, his disappointment, is all her doing – her, and her pulsing, desiring uterus.
Pat puts his arm over her. She freezes.
She told Pat she had paid the tax bill, and she hasn’t. She has spent the money for the tax. She was going to pay it out of her advance for this job – she told him she was getting less than she was, so that she’d have the extra money to pay herself back with. She was going to pay Freya back out of that money too. It’s all her agent’s fault. She was supposed to send it into Cara’s private account but she sent it through to the joint one instead. Pat was pleasantly surprised. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘You thought you were only getting four grand for that job…’
She can’t tell him that she lied like that. She can’t tell him she overspent again. And on what? Pregnancy vitamins, omegas for the kids, Epsom salts, slippers for Megan – ridiculously expensive slippers made in Germany – the right one is a puppy, the left a kitten with a little pink tongue dangling from it. Megan hates them. She says they’re itchy.
Her children are pulling her thin. Each of them, as they left her body, tugged a part of her with them out into another life. She is divided by each of them. She will die like the mint plant at the end of the garden. Last spring, its babies sprouted out from its roots, and all through the summer, the mother plant remained, a bunch of dry yellow twigs. She never dug it out. It’s still there, gone black and slimy in the frost. It has divided and divided until it was gone. Is that what it’s like for Grandma? Is she in her children and they in her?
She looks at the screen of the baby monitor – baby Peig lying on her back in her sleep sack, so still, like a big doll. It’s a cheap, old monitor. The blue screen looks like something from a horror movie; the sound crackles like a wartime radio.
For now, Pat is bound to her. For now, they are surviving. But he has given up too much. When their children are grown there will be a reckoning.
49
NO! THERE’S BEEN A mistake. Molly knows where she is, she knows what it is that’s happening. Worse than the dark, the blue light glowing here beside the bed, the insect fizz of it and the big dark window and the bad breath and gums and her voice creaky as a stranger’s and the weight of herself. No, there’s been a mistake; there’s been a misunderstanding, she should not be here she should not be like this, this isn’t how it goes; it’s impossible. It’s not her who is to die. It’s not her who is to get old, break down, vanish from herself. It was never supposed to be her. She is not the one who dies.
She is the only one who knew his face.
Hers is the only body that bore him.
Without her there is no one in this world who ever heard him speak.
Have mercy. Have mercy, but she knows the things she has done but mercy have mercy. There is mercy, surely, at the end?
She knows what she has done. She knows it all the time; every moment since it happened it’s been pulsing through her. It is in her blood, in her skin. It’s in her every breath.
She said she only turned her back, but that wasn’t it. She never told it to Dinny, she never told it even to herself – that she was hiding from him, from his lovely dry fingers, his chubby, spittle lips; that in the afternoon he had climbed all over her, Wake up, Mammy, wake up. He had pulled her eyelids open, put his thumb between her lips and – why? Why had she done it – why? It felt like she couldn’t move, like she needed a moment inside herself. She had played dead – why? Only when he cried, she opened her eyes, smiled at him, kissed him, Sorry, my little man, only joking. Not sleeping not dead, only a little tired… she wasn’t right that day. Hiding in the bedroom then, while he played with his spinning top there on the kitchen floor. Hiding like that just to sketch with a scrap of charcoal; a spider in its web. She had discovered it when she opened the window, and the big ugly egg sac it was wrapping. A quick, messy drawing – why? – while he climbed up onto a chair and reached for those new round beans she had soaking.
She will forget. Oh, mercy, let her forget. That bit at least. Let her forget.
50
EVENTUALLY, CARA MUST HAVE slept, because she is woken by the discomfort of two children clambering into the bed, taking their usual positions with blunt entitlement. Denise is a round-bellied thing with the uncanny ability to cover the whole bed, diagonally, with her four stocky limbs. She sleeps face down with a determined little frown; her skin is very pink and her sleep is heavy and oblivious to all but her own comfort. Megan is restless. She has a different way of mastering the space. She takes Cara’s arm and lifts it over herself and mutters, ‘My mammy.’ She sh
ifts about, all elbows and knees and bony bum, and she snores and mumbles and throws the covers off her skinny torso and shivers. They both sleep with their plump lips a little open. They both drool. They are both too old to sleep with their parents, and too old to be satisfied the way a baby can be satisfied. They both feel things that Cara cannot know or heal, and they will both become people other than they are now. Life will do things to them that she cannot know.
She remembers her children’s early days like whole eras. She remembers the fashions; the foods she cooked. When Denise was born, whale prints were in vogue: whale-print babygrows, whale-print bibs, a hat saying ‘having a whale of a time’. Bunny rabbits and mice were the fashion when Megan was born; pink and white. Bunny ears on hoods, bunnies on her blankets. It was the same for Peig, or is it only that she didn’t buy anything new for her? This year, it’s unicorns and llamas. She has noticed llama-print baby grows, baby bags, baby blankets. A lot of indigo. The llamas are often wearing scarves and hats. This baby will be born into the year of the llama.
To think that they will love each other – that will help Cara to grow old without scraping the age spots off her thinning skin.
She remembers to lie on her left side – something she heard about only this pregnancy. You are supposed to sleep on the left. Something to do with the placenta.
Baby Peig is propped in Pat’s armpit, her head slumped to the side, her face serious in sleep. Cara tilts her on a pillow, straightens her head, puts an ear to her chest. She’s breathing. What did Cara expect?
She presses her lips to her husband’s temple, kisses him in the warm space under his ear. He was too tired to shower. There are woodchips in his hair. She can’t get near enough to the smell of his sweat and the oily, unwashed skin.
When Cara first met Pat, she felt the breath knock out of her, the way love is described in teen novels, or Grandma’s stories. These days, when he puts his arm over her in his sleep, she feels the same discomfort she felt with her babies, when they were six months old and sat gazing at her with adoration, or kicked their arms and legs with sheer joy at the sight of her, and she was struck with an impulse to violence – to make an ugly face, or wipe the snots from their noses, to teach them not to love like that. It is too much; the children, the husband – she never expected so much love. She has too much to lose.
‘Lift the girls,’ she tells Pat. ‘I can’t sleep. Lift them back to bed.’
He tries to stay asleep. ‘We’re all asleep,’ he says, ‘go ’sleep.’
‘Lift the girls. I can’t sleep with them.’
He raises himself up in the bed, his face crumpled from deep sleep. He begins to slide his hand under Denise, lifts her foot from her sister’s belly, her head from where it rests on Cara’s hip. He begins to lift her. Then he looks through the dark at the puckered lips, the long, white eyelashes, and he sighs. He straightens her a little in the bed.
‘You really want me to lift them? Poor girls. Let’s leave them be. They’re sleeping. They don’t want to sleep alone.’
Denise suckers in a loud, nasally snore, and Cara turns her face into the pillow. The foetus has started to turn again – an elbow in the lung, spine moving snakelike along her ribs. Her new black maternity dress hangs on the doorframe, a triangle of pink morning light cutting across the ruffled belly. She needed something decent to wear to court, but what a waste it was, to buy a dress she will only wear once, maybe twice.
‘They’re asleep,’ she says, ‘just lift them.’
‘Really?’
‘Fine. I’ll sleep in Den’s bed.’
‘Don’t be silly. You won’t sleep.’ He pulls Cara to his chest, a hand caged loosely over her eyes, shielding her from the sunrise already creeping in through the curtains. It’s uncomfortable. Her hips creak. She needs something between her knees. He kisses her hair; ‘Just sleep here with us, baby. No one wants to sleep alone.’
‘Pat?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Pat?’
‘What is it, baby?’
‘I’m bad. Pat, I’m not a very nice person.’
‘Shush, baby, don’t be silly. Sleep, baby. Sleep here with us. Sleep.’
51
SOME OF THE ORANGE chairs are broken or missing, leaving ugly metal fixtures like gums robbed of their teeth. Some have been replaced by ill-fitting grey ones of thinner, smoother plastic.
‘Sit down there,’ says her solicitor, and Freya sits.
The ceiling is very high. Currents of chilly air rush in through the big, open entrance doors. There is a sense of being outdoors, of being unsheltered, forgotten. From somewhere near above her, the occasional coo of a pigeon.
‘Have you no one with you?’
‘My sister. She’s just dropping the kids to school, she’ll be here soon. She’ll be here any minute.’
Freya stands up again and tugs her skirt into place, smooths it down over her hips, sits.
Cara made her get the suit, but no one here seems to be dressed like this, except some of the solicitors.
Not everyone has a solicitor with them. A very young woman stands in the middle of the lobby, pushing a quiet baby back and forth in a buggy. She’s wearing clean trainers with big soles, a velvet scrunchy with little diamante studs on it. Close to the walls, clusters of skinny men stoop together in urgent conversation; plastic bags saying Spar dangle from their elbows. The way the cans push dark through the plastic reminds Freya of girls in school who wore coloured bras to English class under the see-through blouses. Three seats up from her, a middle-aged woman is crying intermittently into her elbow.
Freya’s solicitor is called Barbara. She has big eyes that slope a little at the edges, as though they are beginning to melt down the side of her face and is wearing a too-tight pinstripe blazer that seems to restrict her movement. She scans the room, looking for something.
‘Right, let’s go on up then,’ she says. ‘Let’s see if we can find a consultation room.’
They take the lift up together. Barbara clutches some files to her chest. ‘Don’t be nervous,’ she says, ‘it’ll be over before you know it.’
They get out on the next floor – a short corridor with a swing door each end and four pale doors arranged in a semicircle along the wall. One of the doors has an A4 sheet tacked to it, with two short columns of writing. A woman in a dark uniform is standing by it, staring grimly ahead.
‘That’s the courtroom,’ says the solicitor. ‘That’s where you’ll be going in.’ She tries each of the other doors, giving a little knock before opening it. ‘Sorry. Sorry. Oh, sorry.’
The next floor up is laid out identically, and the first room they try is free.
‘So what happens—?’
She raises a finger to silence Freya – an announcement is coming over the speaker.
‘That’s the callover,’ she says. ‘Wait here. Don’t leave the room. Text your sister, tell her to come up. Room 4A, second floor.’
The room smells like sausages and overused chip fat. There are four chairs at a square table. A small window faces onto a brick wall, painted white.
Cara arrives flushed, her scarf tangling her knees. She has a cup in each hand – those eco ones she’s so proud of. They’re made of bamboo or something; the colour of cardboard with ‘for a greener tomorrow’ written on them in sombre black print. She’s got a coffee for herself and a hot chocolate for Freya.
‘What a miserable place,’ she says. ‘All those people downstairs. Miserable.’
‘Well, yes. Rag-and-bone shop of the heart.’
Her sister smiles and huffs a little laugh. Then she touches Freya’s cheek with the back of her hand, rubs her arm. ‘You’re shaking, Freya. Drink your cocoa. Here, put on my cardigan.’
‘I’m sweating,’ says Freya. ‘I’m cold but I’m sweating through my blouse. Look – you can see it. Sweat patches. Oh Jesus.’
‘Take it off. There’s a hand dryer in the ladies. I’ll dry it and you can put it on right before you go in.’<
br />
*
But Cara is gone for a long time. When the solicitor comes back, Freya is sitting with her sister’s big cardigan over her bra, examining the empty ‘for a greener tomorrow’ cup.
‘My sister’s gone to dry my blouse…’
‘Right,’ says the solicitor. ‘There are five on before us, so who knows. We might not get seen until lunch. We got the judge we want. The judge has children, so that’s good. That’s good for you, I think. But I’ve spotted his solicitor. I’m going to go and talk to her, see where we are.’
*
Freya sits looking at all the notes she typed up for today – every text, every encounter with Jem’s father. There is a sound like an extractor fan coming in through the little window. She scans her ‘affidavit of means’. It is pathetic. Her solicitor laughed when she showed it to her. Is she poor? Is it that easy to become poor?
It never occurred to her that Cara would fail to pay her back, but it’s been months now. Every time she tries to ask for it, Cara becomes agitated and flustered – some long-winded story about her money going into her joint account, Pat seeing it. She seems to lie to her husband a lot. Can’t be healthy. But as Cara says, what would Freya know?
Eventually, Cara comes in with the dry blouse over her arm, and some bottles of water in a net bag.
‘Sorry! There was a girl down there, her baby was screaming. She forgot to bring nappies so I had to pop out to the car and get her some. All on her own, poor girl. She’s only seventeen; beautiful little thing. She’s trying to get maintenance for the baby, but so far the father hasn’t turned up… And I got us water. I forgot we’d need water. Here’s your blouse.’
‘Do you think I should have done that?’
‘Done what?’
‘Not turned up?’
‘No. Oh, my coffee is cold.’
*
‘Okay…’ her solicitor is already talking when she enters the room, ‘… okay, you didn’t tell me any of this. He has given me a lot of new information. Stuff you didn’t put in your affidavit.’