by Colm Toibin
Helen met her grandmother at the foot of the stairs.
‘That was a bit rough,’ Helen said.
‘Oh, she’s all right,’ her grandmother said. ‘She’ll cry it out of herself. She can put people out of her nice house in Wexford if she likes, but she can’t put people out of here. They’ll go in their own good time.’
They went back to the kitchen, where Larry was trying to recharge the mobile phone.
‘Sorry, everybody, if I sounded offensive,’ Paul said.
‘You’d feel sorry for poor Lily,’ Mrs Devereux said, ‘putting her big foot in it without a leg to stand on, as the fellow in Ballyvalden used to say.’
‘Does anyone have a screwdriver or a pen-knife?’ Larry asked. ‘I need to check this plug.’
‘I have a knife here.’ Mrs Devereux reached into her apron pocket.
‘Granny, that’s a flick-knife!’ Helen said.
Mrs Devereux pressed the switch and the blade flicked open. It looked dangerous. She handed it to Larry.
‘Granny, why do you have a flick-knife?’ Helen asked her.
‘Helen, I don’t know if you saw all the programmes about old people being attacked, old people living alone. Oh, it was all they talked about around here; the Kehoes nearly built a moat around their house and the guards in Blackwater were nearly driven out of their minds by the strange sightings. People kept asking me how I was managing. I had no peace and, as you can imagine, Lily was out here day and night with brochures about alarm systems. It was madness. But I’d seen this thing’ – she pointed to the flick-knife – ‘on the television and it seemed even better than a gun. So I went into Wexford and I asked Mr Parle in Parle’s Hardware and he said he didn’t stock them, they were too dangerous, and no one in Wexford would stock them. So I explained what I wanted it for. I think he thought I wanted it as a present for a grandson or a nephew. But when I told him he brightened up no end and said he would order one for me, and we talked about shapes and sizes. He said I was quite right to take the law into my own hands. He seemed to know all about flick-knives. And a few weeks later I went into Parle’s and there it was, new and shiny.’
‘But, Granny,’ Helen asked, ‘can you use it?’
‘Use it, Helen? You just press the switch.’
‘And what would you do if an intruder came into the house?’ Helen asked.
‘I’d stab them, Helen. I’d disfigure them,’ her grandmother said.
‘God, you sound as though you mean business,’ Larry said.
‘You’re a lesson to us all, Mrs Devereux,’ Paul said. ‘I’m glad I didn’t try and break in here.’
‘Does Declan know about the flick-knife?’ Larry asked.
‘No,’ Mrs Devereux said.
‘I must go and tell him. This battery should be recharged in about half an hour,’ Larry said.
Larry bumped into Lily at the door. She addressed Paul across the room.
‘Declan says you’re his best friend and I mustn’t be rude to you, so I agreed to do what he says.’
‘Actually, I’m his best friend,’ Larry said.
‘Actually, you’re just a young pup,’ Mrs Devereux said, smiling at him.
‘It’s OK, I understand. I’m sorry too,’ Paul said to Lily.
‘Declan’s getting sick into the basin all the time,’ Lily said. ‘He says the headache is getting worse, and he’s back in the bathroom again now.’
‘What time is it?’ Paul asked.
‘It’s nine o’clock,’ Helen said.
‘We’ll try Louise on the mobile at ten,’ Paul said.
While they had dinner each of them took it in turn to stay with Declan. He spent most of the time going to and from the bathroom.
At a quarter to ten Paul established that the mobile phone was working. He asked Mrs Devereux for the name and number of her doctor in Blackwater so that Louise could phone him if she needed to.
‘I’ll have to draw the line now,’ Mrs Devereux said. ‘I’ve been going to old Doctor French for years and I go to his son as well now that he’s home, and they know more about me than I do myself, and they’re as nosy, God bless the two of them, as the two Kehoes. And I don’t want them to know anything more about me.’
‘That’s fine,’ Paul said, ‘except you don’t have a phone book or a Yellow Pages so we can find some other doctor.’
He rang Directory Enquiries and found the number of the Garda station in Kilmuckridge, the village north of Blackwater; the guard gave him the number of two general practitioners, including the doctor on duty that night.
‘You are the essence of efficiency,’ Helen said to him.
He rang Louise, and left a message for her to call the mobile number when she returned. As Mrs Devereux poured tea for everyone, Helen noticed that her mother was trying to smile at Paul.
With the first sharp ring of the mobile phone, the two cats sprang from their perch, bringing with them plates and bowls from the upper shelves of the dresser which crashed to the floor and broke into small pieces; the cats leaped across the room and escaped in a flash through the kitchen door as Mrs Devereux screamed at them. ‘The whole house will be destroyed,’ she said.
Lily tried to calm her down while Paul took the phone into the hallway. Helen began to pick up pieces of crockery and delph.
‘The cats have such a quiet life normally,’ Mrs Devereux said when Lily had forced her to sit down. ‘It must have been the last straw. It was the same when I bought the electric mixer. Six feet into the air they went, the two of them, but they broke nothing that time. They wouldn’t come back into the house for two days.’
When they had picked up and swept away most of the shards which lay all over the kitchen floor, Paul came in to say that a Doctor Kirwan from Kilmuckridge was going to visit, that Louise had spoken to him, he would know exactly what to do, and someone would have to go to Wexford, to the chemist shop which was on all-night duty, to get the slow-release morphine for Declan.
When Larry came back from Declan’s bedroom Paul told him what had happened.
‘I got one of those plates as part of a dinner service as a wedding present, nearly sixty years ago,’ Mrs Devereux said.
‘They’re a bad business, cats,’ Larry said. ‘We’ll drown them if we find them.’
‘A little pup, that’s the best description of you all day,’ Mrs Devereux said.
‘Sure you couldn’t have two cats up on a dresser like that,’ Larry said. ‘They’d be bound to knock everything over at some stage.’
‘I’d say they take a very dim view of you lot,’ Mrs Devereux said. ‘And if that terrible handphone goes off again, I don’t know what will happen.’
‘Two scalded cats, Garret and Charlie,’ Larry said. ‘I’m raging I missed it.’
When the doctor came, Declan was in the bathroom. He walked downstairs slowly, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. He seemed to Helen almost impossibly thin. The doctor went into the bedroom with him; the rest of them stayed in the dining-room and kitchen. Helen saw that her mother had changed her clothes. When her grandmother did not come to the front door to greet the doctor, but waited nervously in the kitchen, Helen realised that she did not want the doctor to see her or recognise her.
Having finished with Declan, the doctor stood at the dining-room table and wrote a prescription. Helen noticed that his hair, which hung in loose strands around his head, had been badly cut. It was as though someone had put a bowl around his head and then applied a pair of scissors. She spotted Paul watching it as well.
‘I’ve given him an injection which will control his bowels for a while. He needs to drink a lot of liquid. This prescription is for the morphine. I’ll phone the chemist when I get back, and he’ll have it ready for you. He’s on the quays in Wexford town, close to the Bank of Ireland.
‘This is a very remote place,’ he said as Lily paid him.
‘It’s very good of you to come,’ she said.
As soon as the doctor started up the car, Larr
y and Paul went into Declan’s room to talk about his hair.
‘You’d think with the amount of money he makes he’d get a proper haircut,’ Larry said. ‘If I went around like that, people would laugh at me, but just because he’s a doctor he gets away with it.’
Mrs Devereux came into the bedroom.
‘I knew his father, old Breezy Kirwan,’ she said. ‘He’s very nice. His mother is very nice too, she was a Gethings from Oulart. I didn’t know he was home.’
‘Is his father’s hair like that too?’ Larry asked. He gave Mrs Devereux a description of the doctor’s hair.
‘Oh stop now about his hair. I’m sure he’s saving up to get married, giving good example, which is more than I can say for some.’
Declan was quiet now. Larry and Paul drove into Wexford to get the pills for him. Mrs Devereux stood in front of the house, calling the cats in whispers. And Lily and Helen sat in the bedroom, Lily holding a packet of frozen peas on Declan’s forehead. ‘This will keep the pain down for a while,’ she said. She fixed his pillow and pushed his hair back.
Helen was uncomfortable in the room; her mother was still not talking to her. She began to speak to Declan as though Helen were not there.
‘Helen says that I abandoned you and her when your father was sick.’ Lily’s voice was gende and soft as she spoke, as if they were children still and she was telling them a comforting story before they went to sleep. ‘I wrote all the time,’ she went on, ‘and your granny assured me that if I visited it would just unsetde you, that you were happy here, and it would be better if there were no interruptions to your routine, that she would have to get you setded all over again if I came. So that’s why I never visited. You can ask her and she’ll tell you. I wanted to come down and your father wanted me to come down, even if just for a day, but your granny said it would be too much for you, me arriving and then going away again. It would be too emotional.’
Lily was almost crying now, but Helen saw that Declan was watching her and his eyes were hard. She wondered if he believed his mother. Helen did not.
‘Why did you leave me in Byrnes’ house for the funeral and never see me?’ Declan asked.
‘That was everyone’s advice at the time; they all said that you were too young to take in your father’s death, and you’d be too young to see the coffin and the grave. And Declan, I would have broken into pieces if I’d seen you in those days, I would have broken into pieces.’ She was crying now as Declan softened and held her hand. ‘I couldn’t have done anything else, Declan and Helen,’ Lily said. Her crying had become louder.
Helen did not notice her grandmother coming into the room. By the time she saw her she was already holding Lily, rocking her back and forth.
‘It’s a vale of tears, Lily,’ she whispered to her. ‘It’s a vale of tears, and there’s nothing we can do.’
The pills had no immediate effect. Between one and two in the morning Declan’s pain became almost unbearable. Helen and Lily and Paul and Larry took turns sitting with him in the dark, but they could not touch him or speak to him.
After three o’clock his pain began to ease. He took a sleeping pill and a Xanax and said he would sleep until the morning now if he was lucky.
When Helen went to bed, she thought about Hugh and the boys and the words of reassurance which had come from Donegal. Cathal and Manus were all right; they did not notice her absence, they were having a good time. How would she know, she wondered as she lay there, if one or both of them was miserable and missed her, but learned to mask it and disguise it, and did not complain? Manus would know how to complain, but Cathal would not. He would say nothing, as he had said nothing on the phone that morning. She thought about Hugh and how easygoing and dependable he was, and how much she loved him and the boys loved him. For a moment, as she lay there in the night, she felt the glow of his love, and felt reassured that nothing that had happened to her was being passed on to her children. She resolved to think harder and pay more attention so that Cathal and Manus could feel secure in the world and feel none of the currents which went through her grandmother’s house now every moment of the day. As she turned and tried to sleep, however, she knew that anyone who was close to her must have learned long ago to live with and manage this web of unresolved connections. She clenched her fists and swore that she would do her best to protect them.
EIGHT
It was after nine when Helen woke to the sound of shouting and laughing. She listened and heard the revving of a car and then some more voices. She heard her mother coming down the stairs and shouting something. She wondered if the cats had returned, or if morning light had unveiled them on the roof of one of the outhouses. A car revved again, as though someone were having trouble starting the engine.
She looked into Declan’s room when she got up, but his bed was empty. From the dining-room window she could see what was happening in front of the house. Her grandmother was trying to drive Larry’s car; Larry was giving her lessons in the front seat. Her grandmother would start the car, rev the engine, get into gear and move forward in a sudden jerk, and then the engine would cut out.
Declan and Paul were sitting in the morning sunlight watching this, laughing and applauding. Lily was at the front door, where Helen joined her.
‘She’ll crash the car and then she’ll blame someone else,’ Lily said.
‘She can’t go far,’ Helen said.
This time Mrs Devereux had edged the car slowly towards the gate before it cut out. She opened the window and shouted, ‘Lily, Paul, Helen, put your cars out in the lane. I don’t have room enough here.’
‘We’re afraid to move. You’ll kill us all,’ Lily said.
‘Helen, hurry up now!’ her grandmother said.
Mrs Devereux listened carefully as Larry explained the gears to her once more. Helen turned Declan’s car under her grandmother’s impatient gaze. Lily followed her, as did Paul.
‘Helen, my flat shoes!’ her grandmother shouted as she made her way back to the house. ‘They’re in the hall.’
She found a pair of flat shoes in the hall and brought them out. Her grandmother had already taken her other shoes off, which she handed imperiously to Helen, immediately going back to Larry to discuss a point about the gearstick.
‘Come on, Granny!’ Declan shouted. His thin legs were folded around each other.
Mrs Devereux started the car again as they all watched. She changed the gear and then took her foot off the brake. She let the car forward until it began to shake. She shouted at Larry, ‘What’ll I do now?’
‘Indicate, Granny, indicate,’ Declan shouted.
The car stopped. She pursed her lips and looked ahead. Then she opened the door of the car and turned towards her audience. ‘Go inside, all of you! I can’t learn if you’re all going to be watching me and jeering me. No one can learn like that.’
‘She’s serious about learning,’ Helen said. ‘I thought it was a joke.’
‘Since she got the money for the sites, she’s gone cracked,’ Lily said. ‘Cracked! And wait until the winter comes and she gets depressed and she won’t speak to anybody and Father O’Brien will ring me up like he did last year to say that she’s been seen walking into Blackwater with a string bag for the second time in the same day, and she won’t say a word to anyone she meets.’
‘Are you serious?’ Helen asked.
‘Cracked,’ Lily said again. ‘And she’d a sister Statia, you’d be too young to remember her. She sent me into her in Bree one Christmas. I had an awful time. She was cracked as well. All that family were cracked. So don’t start blaming me now for leaving her on her own out here, there’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘I’m not blaming you,’ Helen said.
‘What was that yesterday then?’ her mother asked.
Declan had gone back to bed. Paul, Lily and Helen had breakfast together while Larry and Mrs Devereux continued their driving lesson.
‘I told Declan’, Paul said, ‘that he should go back to
St James’s today, but he says that if it remains fine as it is now, he’ll stay. Louise is worried about his stomach: there are various things it could be and they would require treatment, but only after a good deal of testing.’
‘Could they do the testing today?’ Lily asked politely.
‘No, but they could start very early in the morning. Louise doesn’t want to mask the symptoms any more, so she won’t treat him until she knows what it is.’
‘You mean treat him with drugs?’ Lily asked.
‘Right,’ Paul said.
Paul and Lily looked at one another across the table and nodded gravely. Helen made more tea for them as they continued talking. After a while, Larry and Mrs Devereux came into the kitchen.
‘It’s that first gear has me flummoxed,’ Mrs Devereux said.
‘And second and third too, I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Lily said.
‘No, Mrs Breen, she has great potential,’ Larry said. ‘My father taught my mother to drive only last year.’
‘You’ll have to get a provisional licence,’ Helen said.
‘Oh, sure that’s no problem, Helen,’ her grandmother said. ‘Didn’t I tell you what Kitty Walsh from The Ballagh did last year, and she’s so blind she can’t see in front of her nose, and that’s God’s truth. Didn’t she go into the eye man the day before her appointment, and she just said she was looking at spectacle frames – her sister Winnie told me this – and didn’t she look closely at the letters when the door was open, you know, the letters you have to read. She wrote them down and went home and learned them off. So by the next day the eye man complimented her on her sight when she could hardly see the colour of the money she was paying him with. And she driving a Mazda mad all over the country now. Get into the ditch if you see her coming. A red Mazda.’
‘Someone should report her,’ Lily said.
‘It was Winnie told me, and she thought it was a terrible thing. But there was never any talking to Kitty. Their mother was an awful oul’ rip and she lived into her nineties. Kitty had put up with a lot, and nothing would do her but a car once the mother was dead. So watch out for her now!’