An Unravelling

by Elske Rahill

  *

  ‘Tell me this and tell me no more…’

  ‘Yes, Grandma? Tell you what?’

  ‘What was that message, tell me?’

  PART 4

  60

  WHEN MEGAN IN THE hospital choking with her tongue it beed not like this. It beed fast and blinking bright.

  This hospital is no colours. School assembly hall. Strangers’ farts. There a secret going on here. She can feel it in her neck.

  ‘Cawy me, Daddy.’

  Megan know it be a tonne weight for daddy to be carrying her and also baby Peggy but she does whinge and whinge acause she needs to be carried this day.

  They be going to say bye bye to Mimi.

  That meaned Daddy won the discussing, acause in the night Den did be crying and saying she want to see Mimi. Mammy say, ‘No, Den. You don’t want to see her like that…’ but then Mammy and Daddy were discussing.

  Megan sayed it very whispering: ‘I have to tell somefing to Mimi’ but they didn’t be hearing her.

  Mammy think Megan don’t be knowing how it is. Den telled her and anyway she knowed already. All the bits of Mimi do be flying off like she be maked of birds. All her words be going and all her pictures and she be nearly all gone now but Megan haves to tell her.

  When they be getting out of the car she thinked maybe Mimi is not being here. She be all flewn away maybe. Den has a face like she think so too.

  *

  They find the room in the hospital and that take a long time. When Daddy open the door, Megan bees very sleepy, so sleepy like she can’t even see and she can’t walk, and she put her face in Daddy’s shirt.

  Aunty Freya be there and Jem and they not saying Hi.

  It is Mimi in the bed. That’s what Daddy say, and DenDen say no and holds Daddy’s leg and he can’t walk anymore so Megan lets him put her on the floor and now she can stand and she can walk.

  There bees a lie here. Some of Mimi be flewn away and in the bed is bits of her left. She know DenDen be scared even if she be a big girl and Megan not be scared at all. It be not very Mimi in the bed, but she go up quickly aside Freya and Jem and she stretch up at the hand that Aunty Freya be holding and there bees a smell like Mimi’s house and very quickly, on the big big thumb, she tells a kiss.

  61

  ON THE WALL A flimsy clock ticks audibly and too slowly; a red hand trembling with the effort of each second. There is a dead, deep-bellied television fixed to the wall, but no sign anywhere of a remote control to switch it on with.

  All windy night the roof of Aoife’s well-built house whimpered like grieving puppies, and this morning there were long, deep scratches like claw marks on the Audi. She’s not superstitious. It’s not that. But she knows it will be today. It can’t go on.

  Cara is sitting there opening an avocado. She raises her head, breathes, ‘Hi,’ as Sinéad nods, dipping as though to hide herself in the greyness of the room. She sits a few seats up from their niece, rubs her palms slowly on her thighs. The gesture enrages Aoife. There are things she’d like to say to Sinéad, buck up, cop on…

  Their niece is using a white disposable knife with a serrated blade, an ineffectual looking thing, so it surprises Sinéad to see the avocado shell split into two papery bowls of lurid flesh.

  She places one half – the half with the stone in it – on the empty seat beside her. Sinéad notices a straggle of root starting at the base of the stone. You have to stick toothpicks in them, or something, and tripod them over water, to make them grow. Something like that. Sinéad has tried growing things from fruit pits. Once an apple seed sprouted a frail white shoot, but it rotted before it came to much.

  The room they are sitting in comprises many shades of brown-grey plastics. A strip of tinted glass looks out onto the breezeblock wall outside. It reminds Sinéad of another room – the same kind of cold and the same ruthless hygiene – yes, somewhere buried in her memory she has been here before, in a room like this one with odourless air and seats that make a knot on each knuckle of her bottom, waiting with the sanitised surfaces for something to be given or taken away.

  They are only waiting now. There is nothing else left to happen. Mammy’s every breath could be the last. It’s been this way for days, so by now time is stretched out; every beat another painful distance to be crossed.

  How can Cara sit so easy like that, with Mammy dying in the next room? So easy that she can chew and swallow, her knees parted like a man’s, rubbing her swollen womb proudly over and over with one hand, spooning the interior of the fruit into herself with the other, and around her face the unruly hair dark and wiry as a pubic mound.

  Can’t she feel Sinéad watching her? She pulls a hair out through her lips – a long, kinked thing wet with her mouth’s contents. She lays it on her knee, and continues to eat. Then she inserts the next half of the avocado into the empty shell of its twin, and picks at the slimy stone to loosen it. She takes it out and places it in an empty paper coffee cup by her feet, parting her legs even more in the effort of bending herself.

  Across the room, Aoife’s face is twisting the way it does when she is angry or self-conscious; her tongue thrusting a lump in her jaw, as though searching food out from between her lower teeth. She is clutching her phone, glancing impatiently at the screen.

  *

  Aoife can’t look directly at her niece, but there is something satisfying about Cara sitting there alone without her children, or her man, or her willowy little sister to bolster her up. She is exposed now amongst empty seats, nothing to conceal the awkward shape of her pregnant body; nipples and navel pushing shamelessly through the pilled cotton jumper like silly buttons. Her movements are deliberate, as though she knows she is being watched.

  Ha! Aoife can see it from here – a little patch of horrid brown rot in the concave where the avocado stone was. Ha! Serves her right; sitting there, brazen as you like, scoffing her avocado. Organic or Fairtrade or whatever.

  Cara folds the skins, squishing the remaining brown paste, and pushes them into the empty coffee cup. She raises herself up off the chair and slides it back, making the lino floor yelp. She moves with obvious effort to be quiet and subtle, but the clumsy bulk of her makes her ridiculous. She carries the paper cup with the discarded avocado bits to a bin outside the door.

  *

  It saddens Sinéad to see Aoife like this, her face ugly with fear and rage: pale eyes; sharp, quick pupils swivelling like the eyes of chickens. Her sister is staring at the door as though sheer outrage might pull Cara back into the waiting room, away from Mammy.

  Aoife’s phone beeps discreetly and she pulls herself tall, chin in her neck, and peers down her nose at the screen. Then she says victoriously, ‘Valerie will be here soon!’

  ‘Oh, good,’ says Sinéad. ‘Terence is on his way too.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ Aoife nods. Then, as an afterthought, ‘It will be nice for Mammy to hear his voice.’

  That’s nonsense, of course. But it will be a comfort, perhaps, to have him here. He will be calm and appropriate and he will not feel too much. They have become that for one another; a comfort, a steady mooring.

  Aoife is clutching the phone with both hands, waving it firmly like evidence.

  ‘Valerie will be here in five,’ she says, something like threat in her voice. ‘She will bring us some coffee.’

  *

  Aoife removes her compact mirror slowly from her handbag – a great handbag with lots of compartments so that things don’t get lost. Her father used to nod proudly at her fastidiousness, ‘A place for everything and everything in its place…’ She powders her nose to take the shine off. Her lipstick has disappeared, but the good-quality lipliner has stayed in place, framing the pale pleat of flesh as though in mockery. She takes her lipstick out of the special pouch, remembering how Mammy can be saddened by her blueish lips. ‘My Fifi, look at your lips. Are you getting enough iron…?’

  Aoife applies a thick layer of deep red paste and pats her lips with blotting paper. The
n she applies another layer and blots it again, lightly this time. The blotting sheets don’t really work, but she likes the smell of them – like talc and vanilla – and she likes the ritual. She replaces the compact in the inner zip and the lipstick in its pocket, lays her handbag on the seat and stands, stiff with the sterile cold of the room and the flimsy plastic seats. She wants to be near her sister. Sinéad is sitting with her hands on her lap, mouth closed and eyes flickering bewildered around the room. Aoife walks to the window and stands next to the chair where Sinéad is sitting.

  She wants an excuse to go close to her sister. Things are fragmenting without her mother’s ordering gaze. Things are sliding too quickly and they need to slow it down. Aoife is about to turn to Sinéad, to make some gesture – a hug perhaps, or just her wide hand over her sister’s chubby one, a squeeze, or a pat on the arm – when at last Valerie enters with a gust of cool air, her scarf hanging long and her nose red with the outdoors. She is balancing a cardboard tray containing two takeaway cups.

  Aoife clasps her hands together, dizzy with relief.

  ‘There you are,’ she says.

  62

  GRANDMA’S BODY IS FULL of liquid, the life forced into it through a glucose drip. She is propped at an angle but still there is a terrible flatness and weight, as though gravity has a special claim on her. Every slow breath shudders her ribs and sends sounds of drowning out through her lips. Her face is still, the skin drawn taut over her forehead and down her cheeks. One deep crinkle by her mouth bends and flutters and deepens when she inhales, betraying a great effort to heave up out of death and hold herself here.

  Cara kisses Grandma’s heavy hand. There’s a purple hue under the overgrown cuticles, as though the pigments have lodged under her skin, soaked into her from all the years spent mixing colours like potions for Grandad’s work. Her nails are glossy and thick. But Grandma is dying so there is no use in nails. And her eyelashes – why are they still there frilling her eyes? Why are they still dark and curled, and her brows still arched in a nod to beauty? Her skin smells like her, a smell like opening petals and browning butter, though there is no reason why that should be; it is so long since the hands have done the things that could fragrance them like that. It seems all wrong, this growing and scenting for nothing. Then it occurs to Cara that Grandma still has four of her teeth and that seems absurd, now. It seems like an insult.

  She lays her head against Grandma’s, and kisses her temple. Her hair smells like her pillow used to when Cara and Freya were allowed to sleep in her bed as children; a smell like soap and warm, new sweat. How? After months of nappies and disinfectant, how does she smell so suddenly like herself? There is no room on the bed to climb in with her. The metal bars press into Cara’s keen belly and the foetus shifts – a foot under her rib, buttocks and thigh pushing up against her liquid-and- acid stomach where the avocado is curdling. Cara shuts her eyes into her grandmother’s hair, and forces hot quiet tears to no relief.

  ‘Grandma,’ she says quietly, feeling stupid and phony and too tired for her own grief, ‘Grandma…’

  Grandma’s head turns slightly and the eyelids flutter for a moment, showing a flash of white and overwhelming effort. Her mouth opens for a moment before she sinks back down on the bed and pulls a big breath in.

  It feels foolish to speak, but it is the nearest they will ever be again to talking. What does Grandma want to hear from her? If sounds can be shaped to words in her mind – what is needed now, at this time?

  ‘Grandma, everything is fine now,’ Cara says, so quietly, in case the aunts come to the door and hear her, and sneer. ‘Aoife and Sinéad and Mammy… they are all fine now. Mammy is better now. We all love each other…’ and she is embarrassed before death and before Grandma; that her imagination stretches no further than this. That she can think of nothing else that could concern Grandma now but herself: ‘And I am so happy. I have a wonderful husband and I will look after my little girls, Grandma. I have three little girls and another coming any day now and they are beautiful and I promise I will look after them. I cook them that soup you taught me – when we were little we called it Grandma’s soup – do you remember? And Jem, Jem is a lovely boy and he is growing big and strong and he loves Grandma’s soup. And I sieve it every time. Everything is fine now, Grandma. You have nothing to worry about. We are all fine now. We will all be fine now.’

  Perhaps worry is the hook suspending Grandma here in life.

  ‘Thank you for looking after us, Grandma.’ Cara dismisses the cringing in her chest, the curling thing writhing and shrinking like a slug in salt.

  ‘Grandma,’ says Cara.

  *

  A nurse enters, irreverent in her busyness, followed by Aunt Sinéad, whose high brows and long forehead express a forlornness belonging to young mammals left alone. She is unsteady on her feet, clutching her side, and around her the space yawns as though unwilling to cradle the wobbly form of her. Then come Aoife and cousin Valerie, shuffling in unison.

  Cara stands up and backs away from the bed a little.

  ‘Hi, Valerie.’

  ‘Hi, Cara.’

  Aunt Aoife turns to the nurse. ‘So you see,’ she says, her voice deep, her words bending along strange vowels like a child trying to sound grown up, ‘you see she seems to have a lot of liquid…’

  ‘She seems a bit bubbly alright,’ says the nurse. ‘Too much water. That’s all that is.’ She marches efficiently towards the bag and locates a little tap beneath it. ‘I’ll turn it off.’

  Aunt Sinéad flinches. ‘But won’t that… Doesn’t she need it?’ Then she glances at Aoife and puts her hand to her mouth as though trying to prevent herself from speaking

  The nurse lowers her voice. ‘We’re not – we’re not letting her go by turning off the water. You can always have it on again in a bit. There, you see. She’s already more comfortable.’

  Cara makes a weak gesture with the chair she was sitting on. ‘Do you want to sit down, Sinéad?’

  ‘No. I’m alright.’

  ‘Aoife?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She can probably hear you,’ says the nurse, ‘if you want to talk to her.’

  The nurse’s eyes flicker away from them, and Cara feels a fool suddenly, and she knows that Grandma cannot hear them. It is professional kindness to say such a thing, that’s all. Aoife and Sinéad stand and look at Grandma, whose ageing has turned their faces into the same middle-aged lady – sagging cheeks, long neck, heavy, square chin. Aunt Sinéad clutches a bit of pink blanket at the end of the bed. Her eyes widen as though she is falling.

  Grandma’s breath comes drier now, no spittle at her lips, no drowning sounds.

  ‘I have to get on,’ says the nurse, looking at them softly each in turn and then, head to the side and the clipboard tight against her chest, she takes a moment to look at Grandma with an expression of bemused respect, as though gazing at a celebrated painting that she cannot draw meaning from.

  Newborn babies, thinks Cara, all look the same to everyone but their mothers. It is the same with the old, the nearly-dead, only their mothers are long gone. It is up to their children to tell them apart, or to stop holding them apart – to let them die.

  *

  They stand around the bed. They wait in the silence between Grandma’s exhalations and her next breath. Each one sounds like the last.

  *

  Aoife reapplies her lipstick, avoiding her own eyes in a small pocket mirror. Then she moves up towards Grandma’s face, opposite Cara, and strokes Grandma’s forehead firmly. ‘It’s Fee, Mammy, and Valerie is here too, Mammy. Valerie is here Mammy… Go over, Mammy.’

  Then Valerie makes a sound like a muffled bark. There are grey mascara tracks down her whitened cheeks. Cara notices tears trickling on her own chin.

  ‘You come over here, Valerie,’ whispers Aunt Aoife. ‘You come and sit by her head. Why should she be the one…?’

  ‘Oh Mammy,’ says Valerie, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand:
‘stop, Mammy.’

  *

  They grow bored of crying and tired of thinking of things to say. At last they all sit quietly in the room and listen to the difficult breath, the feet rushing past the door, the shrill throb of hospital machines in all the hospital rooms. They need a ritual, thinks Cara, a chant or something – a death song, or a death dance, something to release her.

  Aunt Sinéad clutches hard at her side as though to trap a pain in her palm. ‘Will we say a Rosary?’

  ‘Do you want to sit down, Sinéad?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  The women begin to recite Hail Mary under their breath:

  ‘Our Lady, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb…’ The Rosary trails off.

  *

  Sinéad looks at the stubborn life grappling uselessly in her mother’s old body. All of her parts seem cumbersome suddenly, bigger than they need to be, and sadly foolish. Soon she will be only those parts; she will be only matter. Sinéad will be next. Most likely she will be next. Then her sisters, then her nieces and then their children. Their children can’t protect them from it. Even the foetus swelling up her niece’s belly like a declaration against death – it will grow, perhaps, but it will die. Valerie begins to smile. ‘Grandma hasn’t said the Rosary for over sixty years…’