My Sister's Child

by Caroline Finnerty

  “So are you going to tell your mum later?”

  “No – and don’t you tell her yet either.”

  “Okay, whatever you want but tell her soon – you know what she’s like – she might be upset that you didn’t tell her first.”

  Réiltín and Isla were in the kitchen when Jo came home from work a while later. Isla and Jo hadn’t been in contact since the day of the hockey match.

  “Isla? I wasn’t expecting to see you here?” Jo placed two bags of groceries onto her white marble counter-top. There was a definite coolness in her tone.

  “Oh, I just said I’d drop in to say hi.”

  “I see.” She started to move around the kitchen, putting away the groceries.

  Réiltín got up off the stool and started to give her a hand.

  “Did you get much homework?” Jo asked her.

  “A bit.”

  “Well, why don’t you go upstairs and make a start on it and I can fix us something to eat?”

  Réiltín did as she was told and Jo started leafing through the pages of a cookery book.

  Soon the noise of a repetitive drumbeat layered with a whiny voice filtered down from Réiltín’s bedroom.

  “I don’t know how she concentrates on anything with that racket,” Jo said.

  “I got my results back yesterday,” Isla said.

  “What results?” Jo raised her head from the page and gave Isla a withering look before looking back down again to turn the pages of the book.

  “From the fertility clinic.”

  Jo stopped flicking through the pages.

  “They said that I’m in early menopause,” Isla continued. “My ovarian reserve is too low and it’s unlikely to be a success.

  “Oh, Isla, I’m so sorry, I really am.”

  Isla nodded. “It was such a shock. I thought I had years to go before I’d hit the menopause.”

  “Gosh, so would I have! Had you any signs?”

  “Well, yeah, in hindsight I can see things, like my periods were so irregular and I was waking up with night sweats but I never thought it was because of something like that. You don’t think it has something to do with, well, y’know . . . all those drugs and hormones I had to take?”

  “Oh, for god’s sake don’t be ridiculous, Isla!” Jo flashed her a burning look before trying a softer tone. “Look, I’m sorry, but maybe it’s not meant to be. How would you have managed anyway? You earn a pittance – you can barely afford the rent on your flat as it is and you’ve no partner!”

  “Yeah, I know, you’re probably right but it’s still hard to accept that that is it,” Isla said quietly.

  “Come on, Isla, I know it was difficult for you to hear that and I’m sure you’re disappointed but don’t you think it would have been too much to do it on your own? Some days I really struggle to get it right and I have Ryan to support me! I don’t know how people do it alone. Look, I’m sorry, I know it wasn’t what you wanted but it’s probably for the best, Isla. As the saying goes ‘everything happens for a reason’.”

  “Yeah, maybe. It’s hard to get my head around it though . . . I really wanted to have a baby.”

  “I know you did – life can be unfair sometimes,” Jo said soothingly. “Will you stay for dinner?”

  Her tone sounded to Isla as though she thought the offer of dinner was a fair consolation for her disappointment.

  “No, I ate a big lunch so I won’t, thanks. Look, I’d better head on. I’ll just run up the stairs and say bye to Réiltín before I go.”

  After she had said goodbye to her niece, Isla left and walked down the quiet leafy streets where Jo lived, through the city until she reached shops with neon signs out front advertising Cash for Gold and Western Union money transfers. There was an Afro Caribbean store as well as a Polski sklep. The last fifteen years had seen the area transformed into a melting pot of cultures. Soon she was at her door.

  The smell of the chemicals that always hung around the hall hit her nostrils, sharp and pungent, as she climbed the narrow stairs. The faded blue carpet was worn away to threads on the crease of each step, just like the knees of a well-worn pair of jeans. At the top she opened the door leading into her flat, took off her coat and threw it onto the couch. Then she unlaced her boots and kicked them off so that they fell down like wounded casualties just in front of the TV.

  As she’d walked home she’d been trying to figure out which she was more upset about: Jo’s constant lack of belief in her abilities or the fact that she couldn’t have a child of her own? She had always just assumed that having children would happen for her one day but now here she was and her ‘one day’ was gone. It had sailed past her on a foggy sea without so much as flashing a signal to warn her as she was left stranded on the shore.

  She had always thought that she would meet the right person and that it would just happen the same way that it seemed to do for everyone else. But since Nevis, she had been too afraid to open herself up to anybody new. She could never forget that sense of betrayal, the devastating hurt. And now it seemed she had missed her chance. Of course there was her thing with Greg but she was too afraid to let that develop any further. Now the reason why she hadn’t fallen pregnant with Greg started to make sense to her. It hadn’t happened yet because it would never happen for her.

  That night the baby was gurgling and smiling. She could hear the throaty sounds as clearly as a brook babbles on a summer’s day. They started low and guttural and then sprang up into high-pitched shrieks of laughter as he experimented with the range of his voice. Soft aaaaa sounds blended with sharper eeeee’s and back again.

  Chapter 16

  Transparent

  As Isla came down St John’s Street on the morning of June 27th, she noticed a red balloon stuck on the outside of the café door. It was bobbing delicately in the wind. Her mouth broke into a wide smile. When she pushed the door open, she saw more balloons decorating the counter inside. It was her thirty-ninth birthday.

  “Happy birthday, Isla!” Greg came towards her and gave her a hug.

  “Aw, thanks, Greg.”

  “So how are you feeling?”

  “Depressed.”

  “Hey, come on, cheer up,” he said, putting an arm around her shoulders.

  She went out the back to hang up her coat. Michelle wasn’t in yet.

  Réiltín came running through the door a few minutes after they had opened. “Happy birthday, Isla!” She threw her arms around her aunt.

  Jo came in after her and put her arms around her too. “Happy birthday, Isla! Here, these are for you.” She handed her a beautiful bouquet of yellow roses.

  “Thank you, Jo, they’re lovely.”

  “I made you this –” Réiltín said, thrusting a gift into her hands. “Well, I made the frame and Mum got the photo.”

  Isla untied the ribbon and opened up the wrapping, which Réiltín had decorated herself.

  “I made the frame in art class.” It had been decorated in purple sequins. “I know purple is your favourite colour,” she added proudly.

  It was a photo of Jo and Isla taken in the garden of the house in Lambay Grove. Isla reckoned she was only about six or seven when it was taken and Jo must have been around ten. Jo’s arm was slung around Isla’s shoulders and Isla was grinning up at the camera while Jo was looking at Isla. They were both wearing matching white cotton sundresses and the bridge of Isla’s nose was covered in tiny freckles. She was squinting at the camera as usual.

  “It’s beautiful,” Isla said, touched by how thoughtful Jo was. “I remember that day . . .”

  “I found it when I was clearing out some of Mum’s old stuff.” There was a slight charge of awkwardness between them at the mention of their mother. “We have so few photos of us as kids so I thought you might like to have it.”

  “Thanks, Jo – it’s really nice.”

  “Well, we’d better go – we don’t want you to be late for school,” Jo said to Réiltín.

  “Bye, Jo, and thanks again. It�
��s a lovely gift.”

  “Bye, Isla!” Réiltín sang going out the door. “And remember: you have only another three-hundred and sixty-four days to go until you’re forty!”

  After they were gone Isla stood with the photo between her hands and stared down at it. It was taken in August; she remembered it because, just afterwards, when they had gone back inside to the house, her mum had got really mad with her.

  She had told her to bring down her schoolbooks from the previous year so that they could take them to sell in the second-hand bookshop. As usual Isla was getting all of Jo’s hand-me-downs. Jo’s books were always perfect. Jo minded her things. She never doodled on the pages or wrote her name over and over again along the margins. She didn’t draw people or dogs or houses or witches on broomsticks at Halloween. There were no diagonal creases from where she practised folding perfect triangles by turning down the corners of all the pages. They were covered, of course, in the Superfresco wallpaper. Every year they had taken a leftover roll from the garage and used it to cover the new school books. At one stage it had looked like they might even get secondary school out of it too.

  Their mum had gone berserk when she saw Isla’s books because she said that they wouldn’t be able to sell them in the second-hand bookshop, that no one would want them in that state and that they didn’t have money to throw around. Then she had taken each of her tatty books and fired them one by one against the wall until they landed on the floor splayed out on their spines or pages first, lying creased on the floor. Jo had turned to her and Isla had looked back at her and they both started to cry because their mother was frightening them. Isla had said that she was sorry but then her mother had turned to her and roared: “Why can you never be easy? Jo is an easy child, I know David would have been an easy child but you –”

  She never did finish what she was going to say. That was the first and last time Isla had ever heard her mention David’s name – David, their infant brother who had died when he was only seven weeks old. Their mother put him into his crib for a nap and, when he hadn’t woken up for his feed, she went to check on him and found him lying there still and purple-tinged. He was still warm but not warm enough.

  ‘Cot Death’ they called it back then. Nowadays it had a proper title: ‘Sudden Infant Death Syndrome’. It wasn’t as common today.

  For the rest of their childhood it was like he was an angel child standing atop a pedestal, looking down on them all from afar. They could never aspire to get near David’s pedestal – not even their dad could.

  On the day of David’s funeral their Auntie Carole had stayed in the house with Isla and Jo while their parents went to the funeral. Jo was crying loudly and Isla didn’t really understand why she was crying. She thought that maybe it was because everyone else was allowed to go to the church except them. Carole had kept rubbing Jo’s shoulder and telling her that it would be okay, that he was far too good for this world and that was why he had to go to heaven but then Carole had started crying too and Isla didn’t know what to do then because she had never seen a grown-up cry before. She remembered not being sure if she was supposed to cry like they were doing or not. She had tried but she wasn’t able to pretend to do it. Jo and Carole didn’t notice when she slipped out the back door to go exploring. That was one of her favourite things to do since they had moved to Lambay Grove. Jo used to say that Isla was nosy but their dad said she had an inquisitive mind and that the world needed inquisitive people. He would pull her up on his knee and say “Sure we’d all still be thinking that the world was flat if that Christopher Columbus fella hadn’t thought to go off exploring in that boat of his, wha’?” or “If Fleming hadn’t noticed that those fungus yokes had killed off the bacteria we wouldn’t have had antibiotics”.

  Isla loved looking inside everyone’s house on their street. She loved how they all smelt differently, like the Walshes’ house always smelt of chips and fried food – not just on Fridays like in their house, but every day. The smell would meet you as soon as you stepped inside the front door. But the McGuirks’ smelled of polish. She loved their little quirks too, like how the Waldrons always took their shoes off and left them paired neatly on a shelf just inside the door or the O’Rourkes had so many children that the eldest boy Eric slept on the sofa in the sitting room after everyone went to bed and his pillow and duvet were left folded on the side arm until the next night when it was time to make up his bed again.

  But her favourite of all the houses in their cul-de-sac was Mrs Peabody’s. She lived on her own and would answer the door to Isla like she was an important guest that she had been expecting. She would usher her into the ‘good room’, serve her up homemade cake and talk to her in a different way than all the other grown-ups spoke to her. Isla didn’t know what age Mrs Peabody was but she knew that she was a lot older than her mum. Her white hair was neatly clipped into the same beehive style every day.

  Rows of shelving ran around the walls on which sat heavy glass jars full of seashells preserved with glycerine. They were like the shelves in the science lab in the secondary school that she would go to in her later years with its jars of preserved rabbits and frogs and its wooden benches carved with pointed compasses. Mrs Peabody had come from Cornwall and said the shells reminded her of her childhood spent collecting them on the blonde sand. She told Isla she had lost her great love who had fought on the Western Front in the Battle of Normandy. Isla didn’t know how she had ended up in Lambay Grove. Her shells were stuck in time and in some ways Isla thought she wanted to be stuck in that time too.

  On the day of the funeral Isla came out of their house and saw Mr Taylor who lived in Number 5 standing on his doorstep holding a pair of tan-coloured lady’s nylon tights. He was reaching into them and tossing out pieces of torn bread for the birds. He saw her watching him and called over to her and asked if she wanted to give him a hand. She knew that no one on their street liked Mr Taylor and she didn’t know why because he seemed all right to her. The women would gossip: “I can’t quite put my finger on it but there is something very odd about that man.” Whenever the neighbours had people over for Christmas drinks or communion parties he was never invited. Isla used to think it was because his paint was blistering off his walls like giant yellow scabs and he never cut his grass. Everyone else kept their grass trimmed so the estate looked tidy but his house always stood out with its meadow of knee-high weeds. Her father would sigh as they passed his garden as if it personally pained him that Mr Taylor didn’t have the same pride in his home that he and the rest of their neighbours did.

  When they were finished feeding the birds, he asked her if she wanted to come inside for a glass of red lemonade. She really wanted to see the inside of his house for herself. The other children had told her stories about how they sometimes peeped over Mr Taylor’s window ledges and saw captured children in a cage, just like in the story of Hansel and Gretel. Sometimes when Isla saw him leave the house, she would run up and peer through his letterbox to see if she could see any children, but all she could see was a long, dark hallway beyond. She nodded her head eagerly and stepped inside the door behind him. She followed him down the hall and went and sat down in the kitchen. She stared around the room, which was the mirror image of her own but with less furniture. There was no sign of cages anywhere. A hsssssss filled the air as Mr Taylor twisted the top on the lemonade bottle and the bubbles rushed to the top.

  “So where are your mammy and daddy gone today?” he asked. “I saw them going off in the car earlier on.”

  “The baby died,” Isla said.

  “The new one?” he asked as he took two glasses down from the press above the fridge.

  “Uh-huh. Mammy wouldn’t let me and Jo go to the church so Jo’s at home crying now.”

  One of the glasses slipped from his hand and banged against the counter below. He reached for it quickly to stop it from falling on the floor.

  “You should have brought her over here with you – she could have had some lemonade too.”


  She had nodded to agree with him but really she was glad that Jo wasn’t there because she knew she would never have let her go into Mr Taylor’s house. She knew she would have taken her by the hand and led her away from him and she wouldn’t have had the chance to look around his house.

  There was a loud knock on the door then but Mr Taylor made no move to answer it.

  “There’s someone at your door, Mr Taylor,” Isla said.

  “It’s probably the bloody Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

  “What are jovah’s witnesses?”

  “Je-ho-vah,” he corrected.

  Then the knocking turned into banging and a voice shouted, “Taylor, I know you’re in there! Taylor!”

  “Maybe you should answer your door?” Isla said. “It might be your friend wondering where you are?”

  The letterbox flapped open then and the voice roared through it. “Taylor – open the fucking door this minute or I’m calling the Guards! I’m warning you, Taylor!”

  “That’s Daddy!” Isla hopped up off the chair and ran out to the hall.

  Mr Taylor followed her out with heavy, methodical steps and took his time unlocking the door. He had to twist the key in the lock and push over the two bolts too. Finally he opened it and Isla saw her dad was standing on the step with his face bright red. The bulging blue vein near his forehead was sticking out too and she knew that that only happened when he was losing his temper.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Isla?”

  She knew he was mad with her and she didn’t like it because he was never mad with her.

  “I was helping Mr Taylor feed the birds and then we were going to have lemonade –”

  “Get out of here this minute, young lady! We’re going home. Everyone is out looking for you. Of all days you could pick to disappear . . .”

  She said bye to Mr Taylor. He was smiling at her but it wasn’t a nice smile, which she thought was strange because smiles were meant to be nice. His bottom lip stayed straight instead of curving upwards to meet his top lip and you could see the tops of his yellowing teeth sticking up like tombstones.