by Elske Rahill
Freya puts the folded vest in the stack by her elbow. She pulls Jem’s pyjama top from the clothes horse – little blue robots on a faded crimson background. She puts her face into it. She can smell him through the detergent and mildew. These pyjamas are getting too small for him. The cuffs are frayed; buttons are missing.
She shakes it out, folds it neatly and lays it on his pile.
That’s it. There’s nothing left to fold.
She leans back against the wall, legs crossed, not yet ready to face the empty house downstairs. Being up here amongst her sister’s clutter makes her feel safe and like a child again, too small for the vast, curious jumble of Cara’s mind.
Cara is a hoarder – that’s the word for it. There are little hills of leaves and shells on the floor, unwashed coffee mugs, Grandad’s encyclopaedias, loosely fastened papers stacked up against the walls.
She feels bold approaching the desk – transgressive.
Cara’s sketches are covered with an old, paint-stained rag with faded pictures on it, of a girl and a boy walking. The girl has a wicker basket over her arm, and an oversized ribbon in her hair. The desk is big enough to hold a trove of inks and pencils and junk: a heap of unremarkable stones, the fragile shell of a snail, a dead ladybird, mute red. At the far corner, filled with roughly hewn cubes of sugar, is the little cork jug that belonged to their grandad. Freya lifts it by the handle, cups her hand around the pale, perforated cork. The cork has a living quality, always warm to the touch, as though it breathes through the holes. It has always given Freya the creeps; a suggestion of human skin in the swatches of cork, the inside glazed cool and smooth as a worn bone. Grandma loved it. Freya remembers her giving it to Cara, touching the cork, turning it over and tracing the rough signature at the bottom. ‘It’s cork, you know. Handmade. A beautiful object.’
It gives Freya a little rush, to be up here alone with Cara’s work. She could pull the cloth off her sketches; she could look.
Cara’s illustrations are busy compositions that fill up the whole page with tiny, hidden details. She gave Jem a hand-painted book about a donkey once. Every second page has a full-page illustration, and opposite it, on the text page, there’s always a little grasshopper or a dandelion or something in one of the corners, or crawling along the letters. One page has a hatching cocoon dangling from the end of the letter Y. That’s what Freya loves about Cara’s books; the tiny, beautiful things you almost miss. She can spend hours flicking through them, swallowed in by the vast world of small things that her sister can make.
She lifts the corner of the sheet. The page is disappointing – nothing but ghostly shapes plotted around the page; vague human figures. Cara rarely draws humans.
Cara. Her faulty sister. It’s some little madness that makes her draw with such earnest intensity. She has worked the same way since she was a teenager – first with light HB pencils, before pulling those fine black architect’s pens from her dressing-gown pockets, or one of the jars she keeps on her desk, and rendering the final lines slowly, lovingly, her hand trembling, lips almost touching the paper, dribbling sometimes, in concentration; drawing every scale of a fish, every whisker of a mouse. As a child, Freya was mesmerised by it, and she would beg to be allowed to watch Cara. She would sit cross-legged at the end of her bed, as silently as she could, while her sister sat at their dressing table and drew friendly and anatomically perfect little snails, or smiling toads in top hats and bow ties, or pointy-eared pixies with ‘Cara’s special pens’, which Freya was not allowed to touch. Cara used to snap at her for breathing too loudly behind her, and Grandad used to send her away. ‘Leave Cara be, Freya. She can’t concentrate with you there. Go help Grandma.’
Freya thought Cara-at-work was something magical and magnificent then; something she was grateful to be near.
Is it over now, the magic? Is Cara too tired now, too thwarted and disappointed? There is a hardness along her jaw. There are long, violent creases around her eyes.
Every morning, from the spare room, Freya hears her mount the stairs at five o’clock. She hears the wheels of her chair on the floor, the crossing and recrossing of her feet. She stays up here until eight, when it’s time to wake the children. Sometimes she works at night too, if she has a deadline. So, she is always tired. And now that she is pregnant again, her face seems rubbed and smudged all the time, as though she cannot muster the energy to hold her features solid, as though there is no room for stillness in all the actions she needs to perform and all the worlds she needs to create.
Freya sits at the desk. She does a spin on the chair. It’s only that she hits it with her foot, or she wouldn’t have noticed it – the big hatbox that she took from Grandma’s.
It was during those few days after they’d got rid of all the carers and before they put Grandma in the home. Freya had been sitting by Grandma’s chair, telling her about Jem – a topic that used to make her beam and rattle on, repeating the same anecdotes and chuckling at them. Grandma began to list all the things she wanted Freya to take – nice glass jars she had kept for jam, a milk jug, her ‘zoom zoom’ for making soup. Freya brought a cardboard box in from the utility room and put it on Grandma’s footstool. She placed in it everything Grandma told her to.
When the box was full, Grandma looked past her. ‘Go upstairs,’ she said, ‘to my bedroom. Go to the wardrobe and up high – pull a chair over to stand on – and there is a box there full of the most beautiful cotton yarn. Bring it to Cara will you? She can knit them some warm vests from it. I will never use it now, my wrists hurt if I knit, and who knows what will happen to all my things. People passing through. People rifling through everything, dividing it up. That beautiful cotton will be wasted – who appreciates good cotton anymore? They will throw it out. I think sometimes that we might have spoiled our children. That’s the problem. Give it to Cara, tell her to make something useful with it.’
There were two boxes. She took down the botched hatbox first, thinking that the yarn was in there. When she lifted the lid, it let off a dry, kittenish smell. There was a mixture of objects she vaguely recognised: a child’s sampler with a hard vein in it where some dropped stitches had been retrieved by an adult and tightly picked up; a pair of white lace socks; a birthday card with shiny hearts stuck on the front. She put the lid back on, and rushed out to the car with it. She stole it. Why did she do that?
She put it in Cara’s attic storage without even looking in it again. Cara must have taken it out when she took out the Christmas decorations.
She kneels on the floor and pulls out the box. She opens the card. There’s a pop-up chicken in the centre fold, a speech bubble saying Happy Birthday Grandma You are a Spring Chicken ha ha. Under the card is a school project she once did on Irish bridges, and one Cara did on butterflies. She lifts them out one by one and lays them on the floor. She got five stars for the bridge project – she remembers that – and she felt like a fraud because Cara had helped her to draw the bridges. She takes out a flimsy cardboard creation; some sort of rabbit or mouse made from the inner tube of toilet paper rolls, with a coiling tail and a pompom nose and the eyes and whiskers drawn in great detail. Along the tail, tiny letters spell for grandma love Cara and Freya. There is a small, brown-skinned baby doll with a tiny hand-knitted dress, and an O in its mouth where it must have had a dummy once. There are two books – the first is a big book, The Three Little Kittens, with pictures instead of certain words, like a pair of mittens for ‘mittens’ or an S-shaped scarf for ‘scarf’. The pages feel waxy, and there are strings running through it, like raw silk. The binding is loose and some pages are missing. The only thing Freya recognises is a copy of Charlotte’s Web. The pages are frayed and soft and fragrant. On the inner cover Cara has written her name in pencil, the joined-up letters pressed carefully and with deliberate neatness onto the paper so that the lead shines dense like magnetite. Beneath Cara’s name, her own is written in a lighter, shakier hand, FREYA.
Freya holds the book in both hands. She puts
her lips to it. She wants it; those parts of her life with Grandma and Grandad and her sister that have been pried quietly away.
At the bottom of a box there’s an envelope of very thin paper. A Polaroid photo of her mother with Cara and a white-haired baby – the baby must be her. They are outside. There are yellow flowers in the background. Cara has a pink nose and slightly pink eyes and her dark hair is in two ponytails. She is a little too close, reaching for something behind the camera. Their mother’s cheek is pressed to the baby’s. She is smiling broadly, beautifully. She loves them.
Something painful moves up like vomit from Freya’s stomach.
The things she knows – are they the fabrications of a sick mind? Have she and Cara made it all up, about their mother? And even if they haven’t, what did she really do that was so bad? In a court of law, with her hand on her heart, what would she say?
Their mother was frightened of Cara. She thought there was something bad in her. Freya can remember that; she can remember how her mother lied to the police woman that time; how she dragged Freya into the lie, how it tasted in her mouth – like blood. But she can remember other times too, when Cara’s wrongness seemed very real to her. When it was she and her mother battling the darkness, and she can remember how good that felt, how strong and happy she felt, the togetherness of that.
Strangely, she remembers very little of what happened after that – when Cara was gone and it was just Freya and her mother. There is a different colour to those memories, as though the lights were lower, as though they are submerged in dark water. She believed in her own illness; and she believed in her mother’s cures. Her mother used to make her drink glasses of oil mixed with grapefruit juice, held the bucket under her chin while it came back up. ‘Good girl… poor Freya.’
Freya rubs at the photograph with her thumb. She is crying but it feels like the crying is forced; like she is performing.
She knew The Lily once – she really knew her, and she knows her mother believed her own stories, her own lies, even as she covered them up. Perhaps she really believed it would do Freya good to vomit three times a day. Freya can remember the diarrhoea all through those months, and big green globs that came out of her, like things belonging to mysterious oceans, or nuclear experiments. They were toxins, her mother said; they were negative entities she had absorbed from Cara.
Was it abuse, the way the social worker said? Or some quirky alternative health fads? There is no unpicking the past – knots form, the yarn crimps and frays – there is no way of reconciling it all, of pulling out the stitches and weaving things back together.
She knows it is dangerous to pity her mother; it is dangerous to second-guess herself. Freya will need to do away with this photo; that’s all. With difficulty, she folds it twice and stuffs it into the pocket of her jeans. She will get rid of it in some thorough and final way.
She can feel the photograph, sharp in her pocket when the doorbell rings. She is thinking about it as she opens the door; about how to destroy it, about what would be the least creepy way to destroy it. If she leaves it in bright sunlight, the image will simply grow whiter and whiter until it is gone.
On the doorstep there’s a man with a clipboard. He’s dressed in very clean blue overalls. Behind him, a van, another man in the same overalls opening the back of it.
‘Hi,’ says the man. ‘Am I at the right house? Cara Kearney?’
‘Oh. Yes. I mean, I’m not her but this is the right house.’
‘I have three dishwashers here for her.’
‘Three?’
‘Three Bosch dishwashers here for her. Is that right?’
‘She didn’t say anything.’
‘They’re new models. They were pre-ordered. They were ordered a good few months ago. A delay… She might have forgotten. They would have sent an email, but she might have forgotten…’
55
THIS MORNING, LILY AND her sisters had prepared giddily for Cara’s visit, laughing, reassuring one another. Aoife licked her thumb and wiped some mascara from beneath Eileen’s eye; Sinéad made her some lemon balm tea.
But after Cara left, there was a disappointing quiet. The fervour had passed. For a few minutes, Aoife sat at the table. Then she said, ‘Right, well I’m off.’
Sinéad finished her tea, and helped Eileen to clear up. She left the brownies wrapped in parchment on the butcher’s block.
She’d love that. She’d love if Eileen ate the brownies and got as fat and diseased as she is.
Eileen wraps them tightly, squeezing them to mush in their soggy paper, and pushes them down into the bin.
*
She phones the gardener and tells him he needs to come urgently to weed the rockery, but he says, ‘No, I’m sorry, Miss Kearney.’
‘Oh, call me Lily, please Hugh…’
‘I’m sorry, Lily, I’m not available until next week.’
‘This is urgent,’ she says. ‘I’ll pay you double. There are weeds choking my rock plants…’
But he is stubborn. She phones the electrician – she’s going to have the living-room lights changed to dimmers – but he’s not picking up. She rings him again, and again, and then she leaves a voicemail telling him to phone her back as soon as possible or she will have to find another electrician.
It’s getting dark already. She pulls the curtains closed around the big bay window of her bedroom. She switches on all the salt lamps and turns up the daylight bulb very slightly, making a little twilight here in her room.
She sits at her vanity table and combs out her hair. She begins to count silently – she has to do a hundred strokes every evening or the spell might break.
This room is her sanctuary. The walls are bare, but in every corner there is a paper model of her house, the symbols for money and love placed in their appropriate rooms. All you have to do is wait. You make the models, you plant the messages, you ask the universe, and then you wait. Under the glass protecting the boxwood of her vanity table, she has put a hundred-euro note, a lock of hair, a laurel leaf. She kisses her fingertips, touches the glass.
In this lovely glow she can look closely at her face – she is very pretty. You can tell she is somebody’s little sister, her daddy’s favourite, the envy of her peers. Aoife licked her thumb earlier, and tidied her mascara, and everything was right again. Aoife remembered that Lily is her little sister. Pretty little, cheeky little, feisty little Lily.
Her hair – her hair is still toffee gold. She sighs and a kind of joy lights in her. It is good to take a moment sometimes, to appreciate the miracle of herself.
But it’s made her uneasy, the way Aoife upped and left so abruptly like that. They forget – they all forget who Lily is.
Daddy shaved Aoife’s underarms, more than once. Lily saw. It was no secret. Aoife would ask him to shave her underarms, and he did it using his shaving brush and razor. That was strange, wasn’t it? That was not something Aoife would like to be reminded of. There was nothing more to it, but does Aoife forget what Lily knows? They shared a home for decades; they came from the same body. Does she think she can erase that, getting up like that, nodding farewell like a stranger, her lips tight with all their secrets?
Lily is a little shaken after seeing her daughter. Cara is so old. In the sunroom she took a worn bobbin from her wrist, held it in her wine-stained teeth while she scraped all that unruly hair into a ponytail, and Lily noticed a few crazed greys zigzagging out from her temples. Her own daughter is grey before she is. Everything is out of time. Mammy is alive and Daddy is dead.
Her daughter is a wreck of a woman, bitter. Why have you got those photos – the cheek!
Who do those girls think they are?
She is their mother, for God’s sake. She knows them better than anyone could. She knows them from before language, before who said this or who did that or what really happened or any of it.
Ridiculous, to think they can cut themselves off from her; keep that little boy from her. Her own grandson.
E
ileen won’t be denied.
The truth is dirtier, murkier than anyone can understand. Sometimes a lie is the only way to bring it into the light.
*
She has lost count, so she starts at the beginning again. Counting aloud this time: ‘One, two, three…’
*
You get the child you are able for – she heard someone say that in a supermarket once. Two older mothers talking. One of the children had Down’s Syndrome, and the other was running into the trolley repeating, bash bang, bash bang, bash bang.
There was always something off about the children she had. And she wasn’t able for them; that’s the truth of it. She tried, but she wasn’t up to either of them. She was too innocent, too giving.
She did her best to cure Cara. There was always something dark and dead in her, something that sucked the good out.
The night after Cara’s birth, Lily couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t get warm. The crumpled creature folded into her like a clam, pulling any heat it could from Lily’s body. It was of a place beyond, a place utterly alien – how could it have come from inside her? Short, very black hair swirled on its forehead, merging with its eyebrows, fuzzing down its arms and over its back like soot. It seemed so foreign; it seemed full of dangerous knowledge.
Liam never asked her to get rid of it or any of that. And even if his visits became no more frequent, he was tender to her all through the pregnancy. Some evenings they didn’t even have intercourse – just held each other, or played chess – and she felt sure that she had him; that once the baby came, she’d have him. It was only a matter of time, she thought, before he left his wife. She believed that.
He was there for the birth. He watched her in pain and at the time she was glad of that. There was nothing now, no currency of suffering that his wife could hold over her.
But then – she saw it as it happened, there in that moment, when the baby left her body, as his gaze moved from her face to the child – she saw his love shift from her. She felt it. The heat, the light, the love pulled off her face and shining onto that tiny thing. She remembers how cold she felt, suddenly, without his eyes on her, how she began to tremble, and when they handed the baby to him, how he rocked it, bending his head, never looking back at her. She lay trembling, the big cord still snaking out of her, and it was only when the afterbirth began that anyone even noticed her.