by Elske Rahill
He kissed her as they took her to the ward. He put the baby in its glass box. ‘I love you. I love you both,’ he said, looking only at the box as they wheeled her off to the ward. And then he was gone. He didn’t come back to the hospital and it would be months before she saw him again. He would say the baby had spooked him, and by then she would understand what he meant.
And those three days in the hospital, she learned about Cara – the long, sharp nails she had, the furred back. Sometimes, when she slept on Lily’s chest, she seemed like a little accomplice; a witch’s familiar. But the baby had a terrible power. She could melt Lily’s faculties, she could draw her into liquid and flesh with her sucking and mewling, the flexing of her tiny fingers. Time collapsed in her. Lily could look for a moment at the wrinkled feet, and the whole day might have passed. She thought she would have to re-understand time and space now. She thought her world had changed.
She half expected Liam to be waiting when she got home, so when they discharged her, she put on her lipstick and her nice wool coat and hailed a taxi.
But she couldn’t bear the emptiness in this house, the way the baby’s cries rang against the walls. Cara was never satisfied. She used to pummel Lily’s chest with her fists. She used to vomit up all the milk she had taken, and then feed again. Lily was frightened to be alone with the baby, because it was as though her very lifeblood was being taken from her when it suckled – her head spun, her hands were weak. She could see herself drained to a papery shell, there in the bed, limp with exhaustion, too frail to cry out for help, while the hairy little thing sucked and sucked.
She phoned her parents. Daddy came in the car for her.
It was in her mother’s house that she saw, with horror, the real weirdness of Baby Cara. She was a disappointingly ugly little goblin of a thing, even Lily could see that. But just as she had drawn Liam’s love away, she snaffled all of Lily’s mammy for herself. Such a beautiful child, that’s what Mammy kept saying, such an easy baby.
*
But Eileen loved her. She must have. Because she took her back with her six weeks later, when she went home. And she spent a long time pumping her milk into a little bottle – so long that her wrist ached – before she left her for the first time.
She gave the bottle to Sinéad. She was to look after Cara while Lily had her hair done – Liam would be back soon, she knew it. She must have loved it, because she was edgy that time in the hairdressers. She talked only about the baby. Milk stains blossomed on her T-shirt. The hairdresser was embarrassed. She gave her a stack of blue paper towels which she folded into her bra. They chafed her nipples and dissolved, sodden with milk. But when her hair was set, Lily walked the wrong way, away from the car park and through the streets.
She found a restaurant she had not been in before. She ordered a pot of tea and sat there for hours. She read a chapter in a book about Cuba and decided that she would go there. She thought she might do some shopping now, or see something at the cinema. She thought she might never go back.
Mammy was at her house when she returned. Baby Cara was sucking at a sugared rag, her little chest heaving in the aftermath of tears. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ said her sister, ‘she just kept crying, so I phoned Mammy…’
‘I could hit you,’ Mammy said, her lips pale with rage as she stirred two sugars into Lily’s cup of tea. ‘I could hit you. I never thought I would feel like I could hit you, Lily. Have you no shame? You are a mother now. Your child is all that matters. Have you no shame?’
Cara cut her teeth early, and bit her until she bled. She was only a few months old when she started to beat Eileen while she fed. She had a small wooden rattle. She hit Eileen’s breast bone harder and harder until she was bruised.
And why did Lily think the next child would be different? It was Liam called her Freya – ‘flower’ – because she came out so pretty. He didn’t run away like he did when Cara was born. But Freya took more than love from Lily. After the birth, Lily’s hair came out. It fell away in her hand. And she couldn’t shake the weight. She was fat for years after, and her hair wasn’t right for months. Freya tried to sap the youth from Lily. She tried to take her beauty. They were hard, those years. And then when Liam died, there seemed no point to the children at all.
56
‘BUT AOIFE, WHY DO you need me here?’
‘So that you’re up to speed, Sinéad. Mammy made us both executors you know, we both have to take power of attorney.’ Aoife can feel her lips thinning to her teeth. ‘Why should I have to handle all of this all on my own?’
She rings the square bell with ‘Dunlin Solicitors’ written in faded blue fountain pen behind a strip of plastic. As they stand there looking at the varnished door, Aoife feels the moment shift a little and settle over itself; a déjà vu.
The young man who opens it doesn’t resemble Davitt. He is fat in the way that makes men look like giant schoolboys. Expensive clothing and an unruly crop of russet hair.
‘Hi!’ he says, leaning forward to shake Aoife’s hand. ‘You are…?’
‘Aoife.’ The hand is clammy, and Aoife has to resist the urge to take out a handwipe and clean his touch off her.
‘Aoife. Hi. I’m Derek. You must be Sinéad, is it? Come on up.’
As he mounts the stairs he twists his head back, talking to them. ‘Dad couldn’t be here, I’m afraid—’ Aoife hears something clog behind his nose and for a horrifying moment she thinks he’s going to cry. She looks back at Sinéad, who is struggling red-faced up the steps.
‘Yes, how is he?’ says Aoife in a manner cool enough, she hopes, to deter any intimacy.
‘He’s… We’ll see. He’s very tired. He said to tell you sorry he couldn’t come but he has all the information for you. I have everything you need to know. It’s strictly confidential, now. I’m the only one handling it. Hang on now till we sit down and we can go through it.’
At the top of the stairs, there are three glass-panelled doors, all with ‘Dunlin & Son’ in white appliqué. He pulls a key from his pocket and unlocks one of the doors.
The room is extremely bare. A new-looking green carpet, a big, cheap table and two sixties-style wooden chairs with tweed seats and dainty legs. They are standing far away from the table, facing each other. There is a small, slightly contracted water bottle on the table, its plastic fogged white.
‘Hang on now ’til I get the files. I’ll be back in a second.’
Sinéad pulls a chair up to the table, drapes her coat over it, and sits with her gloves on her lap and her hands folded neatly over them. Alone in the room with her, Aoife feels the need to say something, but what? She stands by the window looking down at the cold street, the rush of cars going by.
Soon Derek struggles in with another chair and two big box files. He is sweating. She saw from his email that he’s only a legal secretary. Didn’t make the Bar, so. Poor Davitt must be terribly embarrassed.
‘Right,’ he says, sitting down and locking his fingers together. ‘So, Dad asked me to explain to you that your mother made yet another will…’
‘She what?’ Aoife looks at Sinéad for support, but Sinéad just blinks back at her.
‘He says he had to witness it, you know, because she asked him to, but listen, he wants me to tell you it makes no difference anyway. He knows you’re worried about your nieces being irresponsible and all that, so he made sure there was provision there for you to work with. And that money arrived through just this morning, so I’m going to distribute it the way you arranged with him and there are no immediate tax implications but you might want to get a good accountant on it for the next lot.’
‘What’s this new will?’
‘He says there’s something left to her grandson. Does that make sense?’
‘Great-grandson, maybe,’ says Sinéad.
‘That’s right. But listen, you are still the executors and – he explained this to me – it’s left to the child himself, not to the custodian. He was careful to do that, so actually,
you can sort of entrust it to anyone you like, within reason…’
‘Ha!’ A little chirrup runs up Aoife’s back.
‘But they’d have to keep it for him, wouldn’t they?’ Sinéad says.
‘Not really. I mean, they could spend it once they could justify it. You’d want them to keep it, is that it?’
Aoife shrugs. ‘Not necessarily.’
He takes a sheet of paper with tiny writing on it, and turns it around so that Aoife and Sinéad can read it. ‘So here is a list of all the things it could be used for. They could buy a house with it, for example, if the child was to stay there sometimes. They could take a holiday if they brought the child with them. They could use it for legal fees… There’s a whole load of provisions in there. In any case there won’t be much left, will there?’
‘No,’ says Sinéad, and she chews the inside of her cheek.
‘Not with the cost of care,’ says Aoife, ‘and, you know, the money Mammy owes people. She wants things to be fair. You’re sending that through today did you say?’
‘Yes, I just wanted to double-check with you…’
‘And then we can take power of attorney?’
‘Yes – Dad says once Mrs Kearney has signed all those papers, and those funds are in order, we can make power of attorney effective then, and after that it’s officially in your hands what you do with the rest of it, but you know, a paper trail has to show it was used for her benefit… within reason, you know.’
‘Well, I know who we will entrust it to, do you Sinéad?’
‘Us?’
‘The father. The boy’s father and Eileen together. Ha.’
57
POINTED BUDS, GLASSY AS boiled sugar, scratch weakly at the bedroom window. Sinéad wakes to the shriek of the wind, like the cry of a banshee.
Was she asleep? It’s hardly even a dream she’s been having. It’s only a vague memory – the smells and the tastes of Mrs Brereton’s house: boiling potatoes, that big drooling dog, the oily, scalpish dust of the cloakroom, salted porridge.
When Mammy was in hospital having Lily, she and Aoife were sent next door to Mrs Brereton’s for a few days. Mrs Brereton made her porridge with milk and salt and it had a flabby skin on the top. It so shocked Sinéad’s palate that she gagged. Aoife spoke at her through her teeth, ‘Eat it.’ She raised the spoon again to her lips; it tasted like phlegm. In a moment of pure mercy, Aoife took Sinéad’s bowl, swapping it for her own empty one, and ate the disgusting porridge for her.
There isn’t much she remembers about those days. The garden, yes – picking peas and raspberries, planting bulbs. Her sister Aoife, that time by the shed, the pain in her face as she watched the slugs suffering in Lily’s potion.
*
Sinéad folds the blanket under her feet. Where is that cold air coming from? And how can Terence sleep through it?
She wants to wake Terence – she wants him to know about the porridge that time, about the good things in Aoife.
She wants her big sister, suddenly – her certainty, her pragmatism. But it’s the Aoife of their girlhood that she wants, not this new, cold woman, all quiet rage. The morning after Sinéad’s hysterectomy, Aoife arrived to the hospital room, ears red and her eyes watering. They wouldn’t let her in with flowers, she said. They had made her leave them at the nurses’ station.
Sinéad is fond of flowers, but only in the earth. As a child, she loved the daffodils in the Breretons’ next door; how they spread silently in the dark of winter, re-emerging higgledy- piggledy spring after spring, and the way they withered in the autumn, the slimy brown stems bending willingly to earth.
‘I didn’t scrimp on them either,’ Aoife said, ‘only to be ordered by some little madam to leave them outside!’
This was because of the pollen, of course, but at the time Sinéad, in the haze of anaesthetic and painkillers and the possibility, however vague and sanitised, of death, assumed that flowers were banned out of a kind of discretion. A bunch of cut flowers seemed an insensitive thing to place beside people like her, struggling to stave off their own decline, having bits of themselves removed and supplemented, bandaged and consoled. Flowers, with their inevitable wilting, sitting by the beds in plastic paper and plastic vases, fed by water and chemical food sucked up through the wounds in their stems, would make a mockery of all these efforts at health.
‘Really, Aoife, I’m just glad you’re here. I don’t need flowers…’
Aoife’s rage was too much for Sinéad. ‘I’m very tired, Aoife. I need to sleep now…’ And yet she had been filled with loneliness and disappointment when her sister finally left her bedside. They had agreed not to tell Mammy about the procedure – it might worry her. But Sinéad was not ready to be this grown up. Her sister’s presence had made her crave the intimacy of her own flesh, and as that night in the hospital wore on, the absence deepened it into an raw ache.
The part they had pulled out was a place in herself that she had never seen. But the surgeon had looked at it, touched it, snipped it loose and – what? Passed it to a nurse, probably. And what did they do with her womb then? She saw a film once about the Magdalene laundries, where the nuns fed afterbirth to the pigs. But that’s different, of course.
*
She hasn’t really slept for days now. There’s a natter in her head, something tapping at her, on and on – something that won’t let her rest.
Terence came home yesterday. As he came through arrivals he looked so like his father – a crusty old man with nostril hair and ear hair and tufts of facial hair on his cheekbones, ‘buggers’ handles’, he calls them. He kissed her beside her mouth, his breath slightly bad.
‘Every morning she writes “do not resuscitate” on her chest,’ he said. ‘Poor Aunt Toots. I think that’s it. I don’t think I’ll ever see her alive again.’
His body in the bed disturbs her – he sucks up the air, he snores, his skin secretes a grimy substance into the sheets. He was handsome once. Now that he is like this, who would choose him as a lover? In sleep he tries to reach for her – to reach for someone – and his touch only makes her feel more keenly the big lonely shape of herself.
She shifts away from him and lies on her back at the edge of the bed, looking up through the dark at the ceiling, a huge flake of paint sagging loose like a discarded chrysalis.
No, it’s not Terence that’s bothering her.
Davitt Dunlin is dead.
It was Aoife who rang her with the news. Is it since then she’s had this feeling like a clock in her bones, bubbles in her veins, butterflies in her fingers? Perhaps it’s her thyroid acting up.
The funeral is on Saturday.
Mammy always liked the Dunlins; she liked that they were family friends. And she liked it when Aoife married a solicitor. It used to make Sinéad bristle to hear her refrain, ‘It’s good to have a solicitor in the family.’ But she was right. When the HSE woman came snooping, it was very lucky there was Brendan to know what to do, and it was a blessing that Davitt had their backs.
Now the HSE lady will have to give up. If she rings again, Sinéad will say, ‘Davitt Dunlin is dead. Leave us alone.’
When she got the call from that Bernie woman, back in the autumn, Sinéad stayed on the phone to her longer than she should have. Sinéad thought she was lying at first. Aoife hadn’t told her about the nanny cam. Davitt put it in perspective: ‘Forget about the camera business,’ he said. ‘Don’t put another one in but don’t try to defend it and if they ask, say it’s gone. Say as little as possible. About the house sale, tell them you don’t know what they’re talking about. Freya has made it up, tell them. They’ll need all kinds of paperwork before they can actually insist you furnish them with any proof. Keep refusing and they won’t have the funding to keep at you.’
Davitt was alive then, saying that, and now he is dead. His liver was already cancerous then, and chemo had reduced his hair to fluff, and he was trying to stay alive. Did he know, then, that he’d be dead before Mammy?
No, it’s not just Davitt’s death and the encroaching death of Terence’s Aunt Toots, of Mammy, of them all, that makes her rush around all day, avoiding silences, flinching from her face in the mirror. When she wakes at night it’s with a terrible thought.
*
Sinéad pulls the cover off herself. Her belly looks so foolish – a wonky mound under this nightdress. There’s a bitter cold rushing up from the floorboards. The walls are damp, bleeding dirty water like a cold sweat. She pulls on her socks and a big itchy jumper. She’ll go and sit in the morning room with her daddy’s paintings. She’ll take a whiskey in and sit with them.