by Orna Ross
Nausea twists again. And again. I try to beat it down, but this time pressure is swelling up into my nose and ears and I know it’s going to come. My middle constricts; my head fills with the sound of somebody wailing. Father Doyle looks up from his missal, annoyance all over his face now. This is not what was agreed, this is supposed to be his time. He should have recognised that this sound is different, rawer than the ritual cries of professional keeners. Me.
I try to stumble away, floundering in the only direction free of people, and find I’m walking towards Mrs D.’s open grave. I can see the questioning faces of the crowd but it is as if they are behind a gauze. The cool earth-hole beckons and as I pitch towards it, a male voice calls out my name, “Jo!” and two strong arms shoot out. My body recognises him, sways towards him, but as it does my stomach erupts and I find I’m spurting vomit over his shoes. I try to apologise but the next wave is surging up. “You’re all right, Jo,” he says. “You’re all right.”
Oh, but I’m not. Again and again it comes, sick pooling on the grass around our feet. He holds me throughout – what must his wife be making of that? – and when the heaving stops he places a handkerchief into my shaking hands. I wipe my mouth and try to speak but my lips won’t move and when I step away from him in an effort to stand on my own, the world comes rushing in through my ears, spinning me into a vortex of blackness.
Rory O’Donovan takes hold of me again and I sag, letting unconsciousness carry me off.
* * *
It feels like days later when I waken, in a bed with heavy blankets pressing down on me like hands. It’s been a long time since I slept under blankets. Above me, on the ceiling, strips of timber make a design of squares. I’m in my old bedroom. The old smell of sea air and lavender comes swimming into my nostrils, seeped with memories. I listen for it and there it is: pound, swoosh… pause… pound, swoosh…The backing track to my childhood.
Mrs D. didn’t like the sea or the beach. It was the sand, the feeling of it between her fingers or toes, but also she blamed it for how it clung to the carpets, to our shoes, to the end of the bath after we let out the water. She didn’t like the salt wind either, for the way it spattered the windows with stains and scoured paint off doors and window frames.
The sea didn’t care. On it went, forwards and back, raising its volume whenever we opened a window or door. Smashing itself against the shore like an angry god in winter; in summer, sending glitter-blue invitations to us to come and play.
Granny Peg and Auntie Norah liked to swim all year round, “It does Norah good,” Gran used to say. “Nothing better for a body.” And it was true that Auntie Norah always seemed more cheerful, less impaired, out of the house, out of her clothes, in swimming costume and hat.
So did Gran. Sitting on the grassy bank, or paddling about in the shallows, I used to watch the two disembodied heads bobbing on the waves and wonder.
“Does Auntie Norah talk to you when you’re on your own together, Gran?”
“Sometimes she does, pet. But not that often.”
“Why doesn’t she talk more?”
“Because she can’t.”
“Mammy says she’s well able to talk if she wanted to.”
“No, no, that’s not right. If she could, she would.”
A door opens downstairs, releasing a buzz of talk. The funeral. No doubt the drink is flowing by now, the craic flying, the sentiment oozing. I am grateful for the queasiness that allows me to lie here and avoid it. Twenty years on, and nothing looks much different.
We’ve been hearing reports in San Francisco about a new Ireland and everything I saw and heard on my way down here from Dublin — the advertising hoardings in the airport, the Irish newspapers I read on the train, the taxi driver who delivered me to the church — sang this hymn of change. Ireland now has cappuccino coffee-houses and designer boutiques, super-pubs and five-star hotels, high-tech multinationals and suburban estates, private schools and soaraway prices. They’ve had to bring in builders from England to cope with the construction boom, the taxi-man said, reversing the labour flow of hundreds of years.
To me, it all looks like a touch-up, not a transformation. Beside the little motorways and the out-of-town shopping malls are the thick bungalows and farmhouses and cottages, with their squinting, calculating windows. Grasping, grudging, judging, still.
Everything that drove me away is still here, in this village, in this house, I can feel it watching and waiting. I turn onto my side, roll myself inside the blankets into a tight coil and let the rhythm of the waves carry me back to sleep.
“Jo. Jo! Can you hear me, Jo?” I want to abscond back to my dream but the voice won’t let me. “Jo? Are you awake?”
It is Maeve, standing at the end of the bed holding a tray. Tea and toast.
“I am now,” I say.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know whether to wake you or not, but you haven’t eaten a thing.”
I try to sit up but my head, feeling like it’s packed with gravel, pins me to the pillow. She sets the tray on the bedside locker.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “Should I have let you sleep on? I didn’t like to go to bed without checking you.”
“Bed? Is it bedtime?”
“It’s early yet. But I’m going as soon as I can. I’m just shattered.”
“I can imagine. You should go now.”
“I wish…” And she launches into a long spiel about everything that went wrong as she tried to serve drinks and lunch and snacks and now teas and how she could never have managed without Eileen. Is this a muffled complaint against me, useless as ever in that department? I say nothing as the domestic litany of the day drones on until eventually she sighs herself to a stop and sits down on the bed beside me, her head bent so that her neck bones protrude like knuckles. “Seriously Jo, how are you feeling now?”
“I don’t know, a bit woozy.”
“Has this happened before? Were you sick before you left San Francisco?”
“No,” I say and it is true. Not sick, not as such, not like today.
“I rang Doctor Woods, asked him to drop by.”
“No need for that.”
“He wanted me to drive you down to the surgery but I persuaded him to make a house call. Tonight or first thing tomorrow, he said.”
“You don’t look too hot yourself,” I say.
“Thanks.”
“You know what I mean…It’s been a tough few days for you.”
“Awful. The worst.” Her eyes well up. “Jesus, I can’t stop crying! I think I’m all cried out but the bloody tears are only gathering for the next flow.”
Which is better, I wonder, to cry too much when your mother dies or not to cry at all?
“I can’t bear to think of her, in the kitchen, on her own…struggling to get to the phone…”
That’s where Mrs D.’s heart attack had struck, early on Friday morning.
After Maeve has blown her nose and dried her eyes, I say, as some sort of consolation: “You were very good to her.”
She was. Our mother was 76 when she died, severely arthritic and chronically cranky, but Maeve had converted the garage of her Dublin home into a granny-flat so Mrs D. could spend protracted visits. Every year, she and Donal brought her away on their winter holiday and, at least one weekend out of every four, Maeve and Ria drove the hundred miles from Dublin to Mucknamore to visit her.
Which is worse? To see too much of a disagreeable parent or not to see her at all?
“When Daddy died,” Maeve says, “I had a lot of regrets. Whatever else, I didn’t want that to happen this—” Her hand flies to her mouth. “Oh, God, Jo, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean…”
“It’s all right,” I say. “I know you didn’t.”
She looks so embarrassed. Does she really think a little gaffe like that makes any difference?
“Right,” she says. “I have a favour to ask you.” She wants (“needs, actually”) me to stay on in Mucknamore to sort our mother’s
affairs. Things are complicated. Mrs D. auctioned the house and business a few weeks ago but it failed to meet its reserve price. She’d since agreed a sale with a German couple – who have given up their jobs in Düsseldorf to move across – but contracts hadn’t been finalised. All this, on top of the usual issues that arise after a death.
“I can’t stay,” says Maeve. “I just can’t. Ria needs to get back to school and Donal is up to his eyes in work.”
“Whereas the spinster sister has no life worth speaking of?”
“Oh, come on, Jo,” she says.
Come on: this is the first family duty you’ve been asked to cover in twenty years; come on: don’t be so selfish; come on: it’s the least you can do for Mammy and me and all the family, and might, in some small part, make up for all that trouble you inflicted on us for all those years with your unforgiving attitude. Quite a load for two little words to carry, but such is the verbal shorthand of families.
“If you can’t do it, I don’t know how we’ll manage,” she says. “But before you decide, there’s something you should know. Mammy’s affairs are being handled by Rory O’Donovan.”
I guffaw.
“Really. He’s been acting as her solicitor for months, apparently, ever since she started to seriously consider selling.” She is looking out the window, not at me. “He has the will,” she goes on. “She’s arranged for him to come here and read it to us both tomorrow.”
“But…But —”
“I know. I was as surprised as you.”
Mrs D.? Telling her business to an O’Donovan? Talking to an O’Donovan, for God’s sake. Especially to Rory O’Donovan. To Rory!
“I don’t believe it,” I say. “I just don’t believe it.”
“He’s downstairs now,” she says. “He’s been there since he…since you…all afternoon. He wants to know, can he come up and see you before he goes?”
“No!” I almost shout. “No way. Tell him I’m not well enough to see anybody.”
This reminds Maeve that she should be looking after me. “Aren’t you going to eat something?” she says.
I put my hand on the blanket over my queasy stomach and shake my head.
“At least have some tea. You have to have something.”
She pours me a cup of tea and I wrap my fingers around the warmth of the cup and find it tastes unexpectedly comforting. I try some toast. Again, surprisingly good. Maeve sits on the bed again, closer this time. So close I can feel the tension humming in her, and – like everything else today – it brings me right back: I remember her circling Mrs D.’s moods, senses on full alert, seeking a gap through which she might enter to say the right thing. Usually she picked her moment with uncanny tact but not always. Not always.
I wonder how she remembers it all now. We gave up talking about the past years ago; we saw it all too differently. I take a second slice of toast and she pours me another cup of tea.
She says, “There will be money, you know, once the place is sold.”
I chew my toast, the noise loud in my ears.
“You should think about what you’ll do with a lump sum like that, Jo. You could lose a lot taking it back to the States, with the exchange rate the way it is. You might want to buy something here in Ireland?”
“Thanks for the concern, Sis. I know you think I am doomed to a miserable old age because I haven’t got a pension but — even if Mrs D. should leave me some money, and we both know that’s a big if -”
“Of course it isn’t.”
“It doesn’t matter to me, Maeve. Things like that aren’t…”
“Mammy just wouldn’t do that. Surely you know that much about her? Surely you can admit that, today of all days.”
I give up, go back to chewing toast, and she sits staring, twisting her marriage ring round and round its finger. My silence is getting to her. It always does, though this time I am not trying to.
“Jesus, Jo, would you answer me?” she blurts after a while. “Is an answer too much to ask?”
I make my face blank, a sheet of glass that bounces her gaze right back. I have to, I have to…If I fire off the answer that’s searing my tongue, in seconds we’ll be quivering into a fight, our faces wrenching into hateful shapes, our memories leaping back across the years to snatch up the old insults and injuries that lie in waiting all around this house, so we can fling them hard and deep into each other’s weaknesses. I can’t let that happen, not today.
Help me, Gran. And you too, Richard. Help me keep the vow I made to you both yesterday afternoon – was it really only yesterday? – in San Francisco: I will do this well. I knew it wouldn’t be easy but I’ve got off to such a bad start. Help me.
After a long time my sister says, “You’ve something missing in you, Jo, do you know that?”
She picks up the tray and makes to leave. As she reaches the door, I call gently to her. There’s one more thing I need to say – “Maeve?”
She turns, two hands on the tray, one foot in the door keeping it open.
“This business of reading Mrs D.’s will tomorrow…”
“Yes?”
“I won’t be there.”
I want to oblige her, and where I can I will, but even the thought of this sick little scheme of Mrs D.’s makes me boil: Maeve and I sitting at Mrs D.’s dining-room table while Rory O’Donovan sits across from us, reading us her requests and bequests.
No. Sorry. No can do.
“But, Jo, you have to…If you’re not there —”
“You can tell me all about it afterwards.”
“I really think —“
“Maeve, I’m not going.”
We are looking at each other across an impasse when the tentative sound of steps comes down the corridor, followed by a male voice calling, “Hello? Anybody there?”
And then with great satisfaction, knowing it’s the last thing I want, Maeve is throwing the door open and ushering Rory O’Donovan into the room.
“So, Dev,” he says, after my sister has made her excuses and left us alone together. “What’s going on? Why are you receiving us in bed, like a courtesan? You don’t look sick to me.”
As he’s talking, he’s pulling out the chair from the corner and bringing it over, close to the bed. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to. Lying low, avoiding the mob. Avoiding me too, you brat.”
Brat-sh. The soft Irish T. He sounds so Wexford to my ears now, such a strong streak of Mucknamore in his accent: the nasal vowels, the singing rise and fall to his sentences. But of course it’s my speech that has changed, not his. I am struck again by the newness of him, the short hair that makes him look unfinished.
“It’s all a bit Mucknamore for me.”
“I knew it.”
“I hear you’re a full-fledged resident now.” I speak as if I only heard today, as if Maeve and Dee, my Wexford friend who also lives in San Francisco, hadn’t passed on everything they knew about him since I left. “Was it the progressive liberalism that drew you here? Or the cultural stimulation?”
“No need to sneer, city girl. It’s a good place to live.”
I raise my brows into a question. The Rory I knew could not have been happy here.
“I like that it takes me only thirty traffic-free minutes to get to work. That my nice house cost half-nothing compared to a similar place in the city. That, after work, I can go walking in clean air or swimming in a clean sea. That I drink in a pub where everybody knows me.”
“Stop, you’re scaring me.”
He laughs, then waves towards the window. “Look at it. Look at how lovely it is.”
The window frames Mucknamore in full seductive act. Over to our right, the setting sun throws streaks of orange and pink and red along the sky and the sea borrows and flaunts the colours like they’re its own. Waves shimmer around the curve of The Causeway and, between Coolanagh island and the sea, flat sands glisten with foam. Above it all, seabirds circle and swoop, silver-and-gold underwings flashing in the dazzling, dying li
ght.
“When did you ever care about scenery?” I ask.
“I think I always did, Jo. I know I brought that sight away with me everywhere I travelled and never saw anywhere that looked better. And when the time came to…” He hesitates. “…To… figure out where home was,” he says instead of what he was going to say: when the time came to get married. “Well… Here I am.”
Here he is, turning around the chair to sit into it, backwards, his thighs straining against his trousers, his bulk too close. “And you? You’ve wound up in San Francisco.”
“Yeah. I left London in ’82.”
“And that’s home for you? You like it?”
“Sure. I like that I’m surrounded by millions of people. That my two-roomed apartment is worth a ludicrous amount of money that keeps on rising. That I can choose from a hundred bars where nobody knows me.”
He tosses his head back into a laugh, the way he always did. It’s all the same: the crinkles round his eyes, the missing tooth that shows only when his lips are stretched into his widest smile. “God, Jo,” he says. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“Of course I have.”
“You look so much the same. I was surprised by that.”
“I’m twenty years different. Just like you.”
“Twenty years.” He lets out a long whistle. “Is that what it is?”
Yes, Rory, I think but do not say. That is what it is.
When I was a girl, I had one person who was all mine. A secret person, into whom I poured everything. A boy.
He lived up the road from me and was my own age, but I was not supposed to speak to him. He didn’t go to our local school. Each morning, his sister brought him into Wexford town in her blue Mini on her way to work. He never came into our shop, just like I had never walked up the side road that led to his family’s farm. And if he, or any of his family, met me or any of mine, our eyes automatically went towards the ground or the sky.
I knew he was never given instructions in how to do this. Like me, he was born to it.