Rules of the Road

by Ciara Geraghty

  ‘Do you have a Mary Lennox staying there?’

  ‘Can you put me through to Mary Lennox’s room please?’

  ‘I need to speak to one of your guests. Mary Lennox? Can you check if …’

  I find her at the fourth hotel. Mary Lennox. Room number 106.

  ‘Would you like me to connect you?’ the receptionist asks.

  Now there is no other sound except the ringing of the phone in a hotel room. No sound of traffic from the street below, no sound of guests in the surrounding rooms arguing or laughing or watching the telly.

  Just the ringing sound. Through the safety barriers in my head, I see Iris. She doesn’t say anything, just looks at me as if she’s trying to work something out.

  As if she’s trying to work me out.

  I had thought myself a straightforward type of a person.

  Somebody that nobody needed to work out.

  I was all worked out.

  There, for everyone to see.

  A supportive wife. A stay-at-home mother. A dutiful daughter.

  And yet, here I am, none of those things.

  I’ve abandoned my husband when he needs me most.

  I’ve neglected my children at important junctures in their lives.

  I lost my father. And I’ve thought unkind things about him. Resented him. Hated him. Pitied him.

  And what of Iris? What thoughts have I thought of Iris? Of her decision?

  I suppose I mostly thought she wouldn’t go through with it.

  Why did I think that? It’s like I discarded everything I knew about Iris. Reinvented her. To suit myself.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Iris? Is that you?’

  ‘Terry?’ Her voice sounds thick and sodden.

  ‘Yes, it’s … I’m sorry, did I wake you?’

  ‘No, I …’ She is crying.

  Iris Armstrong is crying.

  ‘Please don’t cry, Iris. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for everything.’

  ‘No, no,’ she manages. ‘It’s me who should be sorry, I …’ She stops talking and I hear her struggling to stop crying, but it’s the kind of crying that is difficult to stop, once you embark on it.

  ‘Listen to me, Iris,’ I say. ‘Put the phone down, go and wash your face with cold water, then stick your head out the window, get some air, and—’

  ‘My window won’t open,’ she says.

  ‘Neither will mine,’ I tell her. ‘Now go on, splash your face and take a breath. I’ll hold on here, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  A crunching sound as she puts her phone down, shuffling, the tap-tap-tap of her sticks against tiles, a tap running, a nose blowing, a toilet flushing.

  I wait.

  ‘Hello?’ she says, after a while. Her voice is quieter than usual. Paler. But she has stopped crying.

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘I asked for Mary Lennox.’

  ‘But how did you know I—’

  ‘Because I know you.’

  ‘You do,’ whispers Iris.

  I press the phone against my ear, shut my eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, Iris. I … I shouldn’t have said the things I said. I was just … I was hoping you wouldn’t go through with it.’

  ‘The thing is … I’m not sure if I can go through with it,’ Iris says.

  A surge of something – adrenalin maybe? – reaches up through my body, swells at my throat, my ears, my fingertips. It’s like an electrical charge. I grip the phone tighter. ‘It’s okay to change your mind. People do it all the time. I’ve been looking at the statistics. Only thirty per cent of people end up going through with it, and—’

  ‘No, what I mean is, I don’t think I can go there on my own.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Will you come with me?’

  I lean my forehead against the coolness of the window that doesn’t open. Close my eyes. But there is no need to come up with something. No need to think. It is a simple question. A yes or no answer will suffice.

  I want to say, ‘No.’

  I want to say, ‘This makes no sense.’

  I want to say, ‘Why?’

  I want to say, ‘No.’

  I imagine a scenario where I say, No, and Iris decides that she can’t go on her own so we all go home, like nothing happened. I’ll go back to being Brendan’s wife. Being Kate and Anna’s mother. Iris will go back to work, to being her dynamic, forthright self who just happens to have primary progressive MS.

  She will continue to say fuck MS backwards, but she will cope because that’s what she does.

  But we can’t go back. Either of us.

  Iris always knew that. She was just waiting for me to know it too.

  I imagine her at the other end of the line. She is wearing something simple. Her wraparound dress maybe. Her silver sandals. Her legs and arms brown from the sunshine of these last days. If she is smiling, her left cheek will be indented with her one, solitary dimple.

  But I don’t think she is smiling.

  She is waiting.

  Waiting for me to say something.

  Waiting to see if I am the person she thinks I am.

  Am I?

  32

  BE ALERT IN CASE THE OVERTAKING VEHICLE SUDDENLY PULLS BACK IN FRONT OF YOU.

  I park outside her hotel. On double yellow lines. Through the glass front, I see her.

  Iris Armstrong.

  Checking out.

  From this distance, she looks like her usual self, signing a piece of paper with her theatrical flourish.

  It’s a scribble, her signature. Like something a child would write on wallpaper. In crayon.

  A porter, in a black frock coat with gleaming brass buttons, approaches her. Points at her bag. Iris hesitates, then nods, secures a stick under each armpit, swings her way towards the exit. I hold my breath, but she runs the gauntlet of the revolving doors without incident.

  Iris moves towards me, her eyes fixed on my face. I am suddenly, urgently aware of myself. The length of my arms hanging down by my sides, the ends of my fringe falling over my eyes, the citrus smell of the hotel soap I used to hand wash the shirt-dress last night, the unfamiliar slant of my feet in the kitten heels, the dryness of my mouth. There’s so much to say. I don’t know how to say any of it. Iris stops in front of me. Close enough so I can see the slight flare of her nostrils as she inhales. Feel the warm rush of her breath as she exhales. Her eyelids are pulpy and the skin of her face is a blotchy red.

  ‘This is why I don’t cry,’ she says, pulling a balled-up tissue from her handbag. ‘It really messes with my face.’ She blows her nose noisily.

  ‘You’ve looked better, I’m not going to lie,’ I say, and Iris laughs and so do I and the porter puts her case in the boot, pauses beside us and we stop laughing and Iris looks at him blankly. I hand him a note and he nods and walks back inside the hotel.

  ‘Oh,’ says Iris. ‘The tip. I forgot.’

  ‘You’ve a lot on your mind,’ I say.

  She nods. ‘I know this isn’t easy for you,’ she says.

  ‘I insisted on coming, remember?’

  ‘I’m glad you did.’ She whispers it and two tears swell in each of her bright-green eyes, roll over her lower lids and down her face with solemn deliberation as if they know they are the last ones.

  I wipe at the tracks the tears have made, then cup the sides of her face with my hands, commit her to memory. She reaches forward until her forehead is touching mine and we lean against each other and I close my eyes, breathe her in. There is a feeling inside me, billowing like sheets on a line. It fills me and I let it. There is nothing else to be done with it.

  It is love, this feeling that I am full of.

  And not like love in fairy tales or films. It’s fluid, this feeling. This love. It is a giving and a receiving.

  I have given.

  I have received.

  I feel love.

  I feel loved.

  33

&nbs
p; DIVERGING TRAFFIC AHEAD.

  The drive from Zurich takes half an hour. The atmosphere inside the car is one of comfortable silence. Which seems odd. Not the silence. But the comfort of it.

  I drive.

  Oddly, I don’t think about the fact that I am driving on the wrong side of the road. Instead, I think about my mother. What would she make of this? She was a woman with a strong sense of duty. Filled to the brim with it. Not the hardened version of it. Not the bitter version. Never that.

  ‘In sickness and in health, ’til death do us part.’ That’s what she said when I asked her how she managed with Dad for so long. Looking after him, long past the point when he could thank her for it.

  Sometimes, after a week in respite, Dad would return home, greet her as if he were meeting her for the first time.

  ‘Good morning, my name is Eugene Keogh, I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.’ She’d accept his hand, shake it, tell him the pleasure was all hers.

  He often thought she was a cleaner. Told her she was doing a great job.

  ‘Where is your husband?’ he sometimes asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she sometimes answered, when the day had been too long.

  She would not agree with Iris’s decision. Not on religious grounds. Although it’s true that she attended mass every Sunday, and blessed herself every time we passed a graveyard. And fasted on holy days. And gave up choc ices and liquorice pipes for Lent.

  No, I think it would have been her sense of duty that would prevent her from agreeing with Iris’s decision.

  We must endure.

  I wish she were here now. In spite of her reservations. Because she would have come, if I’d asked her to. If I’d said I needed her.

  Her sense of duty would have persuaded her.

  Or is that love?

  I don’t know. All I know is that I miss her.

  I drive through a pretty town with a lake and a church and a bakery and a train station.

  An ordinary town with ordinary people doing ordinary things.

  I drive through it, following the directions that Iris drip feeds me from an email on her phone. ‘Left here, yeah, that’s it, straight on now and then … oh yes, turn at the Aldi there.’

  An Aldi.

  A pizzeria.

  One of those cheap chain hotels.

  We pass all these places. These ordinary places. Now we are in a business park.

  I take the next right and I see it immediately.

  Pax looks exactly as it does in the photographs I have googled online.

  Why shouldn’t it, I suppose.

  I was expecting it to be bigger.

  More substantial somehow.

  It has a temporary look about it. A pre-fab sort of appearance.

  The building squats in the shadow of an enormous warehouse behind it. A rectangle of cheerful blue. It looks like it’s made of corrugated tin. Deafening inside when it rains, I imagine.

  I pull up outside the building, let the engine idle. It will be too quiet if I take the key out of the ignition. It will be too pointed.

  ‘This is me,’ says Iris, picking her handbag off the floor. She rummages in the bag, takes out a tube of lip balm, applies it to the circle she has made of her mouth.

  I smell honey. Burt’s Bees.

  ‘Want some?’ she asks, offering me the tube.

  I dip my finger into the soft stickiness, rub it on my dry lips.

  ‘Can I have some?’ Dad says, poking his head in between our seats.

  ‘Sure,’ Iris says. She applies it to his lips.

  ‘That’s lovely,’ he says, smiling.

  ‘You’re lovely,’ says Iris, kissing his cheek. She zips up her bag. ‘Okay then,’ she says, looking at me. Her hand is on the door handle.

  ‘Wait!’ But I’m not sure I’ve said it out loud. Or maybe I have because she takes her hand off the handle then, reaches across the space between us, puts her arms around me.

  It’s not a hug. It’s a hold. A solid one. I feel her strong arms around me. She pulls me closer and my face presses against the hollow of her neck, her skin there soft and warm and I smell her smell. Her essentially Iris smell and it is fresh. Like fresh-baked bread. Like just-cut grass. Like all those smells you remember from the first time you smelled them and when you smell them again, you remember the first time and it takes you by the hand, the memory, escorts you back, through the maze of all your memories to that first time so you can feel how you felt. That first time.

  ‘Thank you for coming with me, Terry,’ she whispers into my hair. There is a collection of words, queueing at the back of my throat. Jostling against the back of my teeth. If I open my mouth, they will tumble out and none of them will be sufficient. None of them will be enough.

  I nod instead. So she knows I’ve heard her. So none of the words can get out.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ says Dad from the back seat.

  ‘Come on so,’ says Iris, opening her door. ‘I hear they serve chocolate in this place.’

  The cheerfully blue building is surrounded by hedges. I can’t think of the name of them now. I can’t think about anything except putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward, keeping my mouth shut tight against the insufficient words, linking Dad’s arm. There is a pond. A stone heron waiting at the water’s edge. A bench. A tiny, wooden bridge. All these things glance against the edge of my vision, trying to distract me. Perhaps that is their purpose.

  Even with Dad’s ancient shuffle, we are already at the door of the building, Iris has already lifted her hand, curled it into a fist. She is about to knock when the door opens and a woman smiles at us. Says, ‘Welcome,’ like all good hosts should. She moves to one side, waves us inside and tells us her name is Hanneke.

  No surname. Which seems curiously un-Swiss.

  This is a first-name-basis situation I suppose.

  She is tall and thin with long, white hair and huge black-rimmed glasses. She is a wearer of comfortable shoes. She is a middle-aged woman. Her face is devoid of make-up.

  She looks so ordinary. So … uncomplicated. If I had to guess at her occupation, I might say librarian. Or lollipop lady. Or the woman behind the glass at the post office.

  What does she say when people ask her what she does? At an afternoon tea party, say? She looks like a woman who might attend such things.

  Hanneke.

  Maybe she did tell us her surname and I didn’t hear it. I feel strange. Like I’m underwater. Everything seems distorted, as if I’m wearing somebody else’s glasses.

  We walk down a corridor. It could be the hallway of an apartment. A home. A place where a family lives. Hanneke – lovely, smiling, ordinary Hanneke – gestures towards a room off the corridor and we file inside. Hanneke picks up a teapot and says, ‘Tea?’ with the smile of a kindly aunt who wants to hear all your news and trusts it is good.

  Already, Iris looks at home, sitting on a chair at a small round table, drinking tea, signing forms, small talking with Hanneke.

  Iris hates small talking.

  And yet here she is, chattering away like one of those mothers at the school gates. I could never think of a thing to say.

  Hanneke glances up, smiles at me. ‘Please,’ she says, pulling out a chair. ‘Join us.’

  I sit down. Hanneke pours tea, which I accept but don’t drink. Good to have something to do with my hands all the same. I tuck my index finger into the handle of the teacup, lift it, wrap my other hand around the swell of the cup. The warmth through the china is immediate. That’s probably why they picked china cups. I feel the warmth travelling up my hand, into my arm, across my chest.

  It’s only when I open my eyes that I realise I had closed them. Iris and Hanneke are looking at me. ‘Sorry?’ I say.

  ‘Iris was just telling me how you drove from Dublin. All the way to Zurich,’ Hanneke says, shaking her head a little. ‘That’s quite a journey.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Yes. It was. Quite a journey.’ And now a lump in the back
of my throat, like all the words that were queueing there have melded together. Congealed. I clamp my mouth against them.

  Hanneke smiles at me. ‘However you are feeling, it is normal,’ she says.

  I nod. I refuse to blink. Or open my mouth. If I blink, tears will fall. If I open my mouth, the deluge of words. Or just sound. The sound of all the words that are stuck there, at the back of my throat.

  Dad leans towards Hanneke, touches the sleeve of her blouse. ‘Have I told you about the time I had Frank Sinatra in the cab?’ he says in a conspiratorial whisper.

  ‘No,’ whispers Hanneke.

  Iris mouths the words Fresh meat at me and I open my mouth, forgetting, but it is laughter I hear. Not crying or shouting or a deluge of congealed words. The relief is enormous. I laugh louder and longer than Iris’s comment strictly warrants. Perhaps I’m hysterical. I wonder has Hanneke ever had to slap people like me across the face?

  I imagine she has. And she would again.

  I stop laughing.

  Hanneke produces another form. Iris signs her name in the box provided, which is never big enough for her substantial scribble.

  She looks at Iris.

  ‘Are you certain you want to die?’ As calmly as asking a question about plans for the weekend.

  Iris says, ‘Yes.’ No frills.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Iris is sure.

  Dad eats his way through the mound of individually wrapped Swiss chocolates from the bowl on the table.

  Hanneke pushes her chair back, stands up, walks into the kitchen.

  I hear her open cupboards, the rattle of the cutlery drawer, the tinkle of a spoon against a cup. I see Iris’s mouth moving, her face creased in a grin. She is telling a funny story. I can tell by the way she moves her hands. To demonstrate. I smile. Nod my head. Everything inside my body is clenched. Clamped. Even my breath. I shiver. I sweat. The walls of the room press around us. Dad crams a fistful of chocolates into his pocket. The scratch-scratch-scratch of Iris’s pen across another form.

  I stand up. Iris looks at me, startled. ‘Are you okay, Terry?’ she says.

  ‘I … need to use the bathroom,’ I say. My voice sounds strange to me. Strangled. Iris smiles and nods as if my voice does not sound strange. Or strangled. I move towards the kitchen, one foot forward, then the other, my hands curled into fists at the end of my arms that swing in tandem with my steps. Like pendulums, counting down the seconds.