by Lia Mills
Like the French word for ‘egg’, Liam said, showing off because his school taught French and mine didn’t. I pinched the back of his wrist because I wanted her to keep telling it, and she did.
Your Mammy said, Oh, oh, there’s more now, more to come, and the midwife said, That’s only the afterbirth, missus, not to worry. She lifted the blankets to take a peek, and there you were, Katie. Like a little cabbage. All curled up tight, you had to be coaxed to open up your very mouth and breathe.
And what did Mother say, when she saw me?
Is that the time? Lockie flicked the question away with a tea-towel and stood up. I’d better shift or there’ll be no supper tonight.
Ah, Lockie –
Skedaddle now, the pair of ye. Shoo! She went to the stove and lifted the lid from a bubbling pot. Wreaths of steam rose up around her.
That’s French for ‘cabbage’, Liam crowed. Choux! Choux!
I gave him a box.
He roared laughing. She called you a shoe!
What’d that make you, only a big smelly old heel, you toe-rag! I chased him out of the kitchen and caught up with him on the stairs to stamp on his feet. It was all right for him: he was like the invited guest, a place set for him at the table and everyone glad to see him, then realizing that they had to budge up and make space for me too. It wasn’t that they were unkind; it was more an unspoken, Oh, yes; there’s you as well. Liam brought me along in his wake. My claim to existence was predicated on his.
Since he died, I’d run out many times, in my imagination, to save him. To save the both of us. From his bed, in this very room, I’d woken to a dark so terribly fractured by noise that I sprang from the tangle of sheets, his name ringing in my ears. I’d come back to myself, shivering, my bare feet cold on the wooden floor. Many’s the time I turned over in the night to see his silhouette etched against the window, and dived to push him to safety. Sometimes, in a waking dream, I caught the fatal bullet myself, or stumbled from the battlefield, his arm heavy on my neck, his breath hoarse at my ear, begging for water. The ground we crossed in my fantasy changed from the cratered muck he described in his letters to harvest-gold, to green. Sometimes I’d add a farmhouse or two for good measure, Connemara cottages, thatched and white-walled, even though I knew well they were nothing like any he might have seen in France or Flanders. I was trying to get him home, but it was its own kind of betrayal, as bad as any matron spouting guff about the noble fallen, the heroic dead of our generation. I should stop cloaking truth with fantasy and face it. For all the times that, in my mind and in my dreams, I’d run out under fire to snatch him back to safety in the nick of time, for all the fantasy rescues I’d enacted, I’d never change the truth.
I tried to imagine the sounds he would have heard as he died. I tried to see him, along with thousands of other men, ‘in action’. Every one of them someone’s brother, son, father; loving and loved; trying to kill men just like themselves. Trying even harder not to be killed. I hated to think about what soldiers had to do, the business of bayonets and bombs. I couldn’t see Liam in any of it. I tried to call up the smells – cordite, lyddite, dynamite, the lethal gas that entered the war as Liam left it. I knew the words people used to describe them: acrid, bitter, burnt – but how far could words be trusted, when there was so much cant about?
‘Katie!’ Dad’s voice was high and strained. My name cracked and echoed up the stairwell. ‘Come down, will you?’
‘Just a minute!’ I folded the letters back into their envelopes and arranged them in their original order.
‘Katie! What’s keeping you?’
Some other voice, rougher than my own, answered, ‘I’m coming.’ My heart thumped. I didn’t want him to come looking for me. I’d showed some of my letters from Liam around the family, but there were others I didn’t want anyone to see. There were things he’d asked me to be sure to keep to myself.
I put the letters away, under the spare blanket on the floor of Liam’s wardrobe.
‘Katie!’ Dad sounded angry now.
I pulled the door open and made my voice ordinary. ‘Here. I’m here.’
The stairwell was cold and quiet, and smelled slightly of damp. The lights in the hall threw fingers of shadow up to meet me. From here, the bald spot on the crown of Dad’s head glowed, like the fragile shell of a burnished egg. He threw up his hands when he saw me, and turned back into the parlour, his face a blur.
Despite its tall windows, the parlour was dark. I pressed the light switch on my way in. Colours and furniture sprang up from the gloom. Mother winced, as though the light hurt her.
Mourning suited her. Black flattered her generous figure and complemented her silvery hair and sallow skin. She wore a silver mourning brooch pinned to her bodice. In it, a small knot of flaxen baby hair, incongruous considering how dark and springy Liam’s hair later became, was mounted on a folded scrap of paper from his last letter. The paper was the colour of a tea stain, with small squares on it, like a copybook a child might use for arithmetic. The letter had been written in a hurry, it said, on a page torn from his field notebook.
Liam was never one for rushing so much as a cup of tea. He liked to take his time, weigh his options, consider all sides of a question. I was the one who was hurried, impulsive. Careless. In the brooch, she’d preserved two things that appeared to bracket his life, but somehow missed the essence of him entirely.
She sat with her spine clear of her chair, as though there were nails embedded in the midnight-blue upholstery. Her plump hands lay coiled in her lap. She flicked her fingernails off each other, a sure sign that her nerves were in flitters. Her eyes darted towards and away from a squat trunk on the hearthrug.
‘It was the one and only thing I asked,’ I said, ‘that you wouldn’t.’ Then I saw what it was. Not a birthday present, of course not, but Liam’s equipment and personal effects, returned to us.
Dad knelt beside the trunk and fumbled with the latch. When it wouldn’t give, he grunted his frustration and punched the side.
‘Easy, Bill.’ Mother’s voice shook.
‘Where are the others?’ I asked.
She didn’t take her eyes off Dad. ‘Florrie’s at the shops. As for Matt …’
Florrie was no great loss, and Matt was most likely hanging around some stage door or other. It was Eva I wanted, but she was at home, getting over one of her many kidney infections.
The trunk’s latch clicked open. Dad lifted the lid. Liam’s tunic rose, as though it breathed. A mucky, sickening stench seeped through the room. It coated my tongue, stuck in my throat.
Mother pressed a handkerchief to her face. ‘God help us, what is that smell?’
Dad lifted a corner of the tunic to look beneath it. ‘Let’s see, what does he have here? … Ah, no. Look, Mildred. The watch is broken.’
I looked over his shoulder. The open face of the pocket watch Dad gave Liam when he went to work for the firm, his own father’s gift to him, was smashed, the hands long gone. He groped for it, like a blind man. I knelt beside him and put the watch into his hand, closed his fingers over its face. Then I lifted the khaki tunic and hugged it, never mind the stink. The arms unfolded and hung at an angle, stiff and empty. I let go and the khaki slid to my lap. I pushed it to the floor, rubbed my palms on the rug to get rid of its greasy residue.
With his free hand, Dad took a packet of letters from the box. His knees cracked when he stood and carried them to the chair opposite Mother’s. He sat into it heavily, letting out a sound like a groan. He slipped the watch into his waistcoat pocket, where it used to live before he gave it to Liam, and unfolded a sheet of paper from a thick ivory-coloured envelope at the top of the pile. ‘Here’s one from Isabel.’ He might have been going through any morning’s post at breakfast, sharing snippets of holiday news.
‘My own darling Liam,’ he began.
Something squeezed my throat. ‘Dad! That’s private!’ Liam’s love for Isabel Tierney was the one thing about him that was closed to me, a lock
ed room, but I’d a queer urge to defend it. All the arguments I’d had with myself, fighting the jealousy that Eva warned would turn him against me, crowded into my mind.
Mother was pinching the skin between her eyebrows. ‘Privacy’s no use to Liam now.’
‘Your letters worry me,’ Dad went on. ‘They hardly seem to come from you at all.’
‘Please don’t,’ I said.
He turned his back on me, holding the paper so as to catch more light. ‘We’ve a lot to talk about when you come home.’
‘What date is on it?’ Mother asked.
‘March. Here’s another.’
I tried to see the envelope in his hand, relieved by a glimpse of ivory What if he found mine? But this was another from Isabel.
‘Why have you not written’ – Dad cleared his throat and went on reading – ‘since your leave was cancelled? I feel so cheated. It must be a million times worse for you. Don’t let the war change you …’ He looked away from the page towards the window.
‘What’s the date on that one, Bill?’
‘15th April.’
‘He’d have got it the week before … Is there a later one?’
He shuffled through them. ‘I don’t see one.’
She sagged back into her chair. ‘She meant to end their engagement!’
‘She doesn’t say that,’ I said, uneasy.
‘She doesn’t have to, it’s clear as day.’
‘No, it’s not.’ I bundled the tunic back into the trunk, any old way, and stood up.
‘Imagine it.’ Mother’s voice shook. ‘And, Bill, she has your mother’s ring.’
‘They’re not our letters,’ I appealed to Dad. ‘We shouldn’t read them.’
He appeared to have aged ten years in as many minutes. ‘What should I do with them?’
My mind raced back through letters I’d written, things I’d revealed to Liam that I never would have said to my parents, information about our friends, things I might have said that would reflect back on him – whatever happened, I wanted a chance to see them first, to sift through them and decide what to show and what to hide. It was all wrong, that death had left him so exposed. It wasn’t only Isabel I was defending when I said, ‘I’ll take them.’
‘No, give them to me.’ Mother’s eyes were red. There was a queer little pause, while Dad looked from one of us to the other.
‘Don’t, Dad. Please. It’s not fair.’ I held out my hand.
I felt the heat of Mother’s glare, but kept my eyes fixed on Dad, willing him to listen. ‘People wrote things for his eyes only.’ I had to swallow the lump in my throat. ‘We all did. You wouldn’t read them if he were still alive. You know you wouldn’t. Give them here, to me, and I’ll get them back to the people who wrote them.’ I reached for the bundle of letters. He let them go. I moved away, in case he changed his mind.
‘It’s none of it Liam. It’s a travesty!’ Tears stood in Mother’s eyes. She dashed them away with the heels of her hands. ‘I want rid of it. All of it.’ A piece of wood spat a shower of sparks into the grate. She swept something unseen from her lap and got to her feet. ‘You may as well burn it.’
‘But,’ Dad said, looking down into the trunk, ‘there are photographs.’
‘Does nothing I say matter any more?’ She stamped her foot. Everything glass in the room shivered – windows, picture-frames, ornaments, siphons, crystal. ‘I said, burn it.’ A fierce glance dared me to argue. She rushed out.
‘You’d better go after her,’ I said.
‘But –’
‘Go on. I’ll deal with this.’
I stretched my arms across the cold breadth of the trunk and tried to lift it, but it was too big, too heavy. My knees knocked off the edges. I took hold of one of the handles and dragged it to the basement stairs. I went down first and pulled it carefully after me, steadying its weight with my body. I’d a sudden flash of Liam, that horrible autumn he went away to school. He bumped his school trunk down the stairs just exactly this way, mimed being knocked from step to step, exaggerated his surprise to make me laugh.
The door to the kitchen was closed. When I opened it, a smell of stock made my stomach even more uneasy. Lockie looked around from the pot she was stirring. ‘What is it? You’re green as mould.’ She looked past me, at the trunk. ‘Ah.’ She moved the stockpot off the heat and came to help, wiping her hands on a rag. ‘Bring it through to the scullery.’ She bent to one of the tin handles. I took the other. Between us, the trunk was easy enough to carry through to the workbench.
She made no comment about the row she must have heard, even with the door closed. She said nothing about sacrifice or duty, none of the platitudes I was so sick of hearing. Instead she got to work, quick and efficient. I took the letters and photographs from where they lay on top of the clothes that were so alien, set them aside on a shelf. Then I followed Lockie’s lead.
There was muck caked into underclothes, a bloodstained shirt, a pair of stiffened, encrusted socks. Underneath, we found a pile of poorly laundered shirts, a dress-uniform jacket that looked brand new, a stiff leather belt. Lockie brought over a scissors and cut away the badges, the single star from the shoulder and the buttons, the shiny and the tarnished. ‘Ye might want mementoes,’ she said.
I fingered the shirt. A button was missing, the button hole enlarged and frayed. It told me nothing. Mother was right, none of it felt like Liam. The army could have sent any man’s things, one khaki uniform was the same as another. Apart from the letters and the two photographs, we wouldn’t know the difference.
He and Isabel had met a commercial photographer one day in the mountains, and had their portrait made as gifts to each other. Liam’s slightly prominent teeth were showing, his eyes shadowed by his cap. Isabel’s face was alight, as though the sun were shining into it. The other one was of me, with a hand clapped to my mouth. I’d had it made in Lawrence’s, with money I’d begged from Eva, and sent it in my first letter after he went to the training camp, last August. I didn’t have to turn it over to remember what I wrote on the back, Little sister, big mouth. The concession to his supposed seniority was my way of apologizing for the stupid row we’d had before he left.
Not even Liam could claim he was older now. I slipped the photograph into my pocket. I didn’t want to explain to Lockie what I’d written. If only I could take back the things I’d said to him as easily.
She put the scissors aside, scooped the buttons and badges from the table to her broad palm, and poured them into an empty tea-tin. The tin was black, decorated with Chinese figures robed in scarlet and gold. A tall woman, the height of a Dublin policeman, she didn’t even have to stand on tiptoe to put it on the top shelf, where Mother wouldn’t notice it. She stuffed the remaining heap of clothes into an old potato sack while I put the other photograph into a manila envelope.
‘It should have been me who died. She’d have preferred it.’
Lockie didn’t turn a hair. ‘God forgive you, girl.’ She slid the envelope into a drawer, as calm as if we were sorting laundry.
The trunk itself looked smaller, an indifferent class of a thing, now that everything remotely personal had been taken away. She edged it into a corner with her foot.
I picked up the letters. ‘I’ll take these upstairs. Then what?’
‘We could bring the clothes around to the nuns, for burning. That way your ma doesn’t have to know it’s happening.’
‘D’you really think we should?’
‘If that’s what she said. It’s fitting. It’s no use to him now.’
The sorrow in her voice nearly undid me altogether. ‘I’ll take them.’
The hessian chafed my arms on the way over to the convent. I was glad of its burn, glad to feel something I could put a name to. Overhead, the clouds were the colour of bone.
A short, elderly nun answered the convent door. ‘Of course,’ she said, when I explained why I’d come, as if people turned up every day with requests just like it. ‘Give it here, I’l
l take care of it.’
‘No. I’ll do it.’
The nun tilted her head and considered. ‘We’ll let Harrison see to it,’ she said at last. ‘He’s outside.’
She led me through dark corridors smelling of beeswax, the walls lined with images of martyrdom and upturned, haloed faces, through a stone-flagged kitchen not unlike ours, and out to the yard, where the hens clucked and scrabbled in their pen. There was a row of sheds at the back, where the man who must have been Harrison sat on an upturned pail. He threw away a cigarette and stood when he saw us coming, a bony man with a weathered, good-natured face under a battered hat.
The nun explained what I wanted.
‘Not to worry, miss.’ He grinned, revealing dark stumps of teeth. ‘There’s the makings of a bonfire here already. We’ll get a dacent blaze going in no time.’ He poured oil on a rag and set it on a pile of kindling. Then he reached for the sack. His hands were grimy, his fingernails black.
I hesitated. ‘I’d rather.’ Part of me wanted to scream at him to hurry and get this over with, but my hands stuck to the cloth, the way Dad had held on to Liam’s letters earlier. The little nun laced her fingers together. Harrison smiled, encouraging.
I gave him the sack. He laid it on the kindling, wiped his hands on the sides of his trousers, struck a match. If we all went up in flames right there and then, that’d put an end to this sham of a birthday for good and all. I fought an urge to howl, loud enough so Liam would hear, all the way across the sea and under foreign fields as he was, his ears full of mud.
The nun pulled a black rosary from her pocket and murmured under her breath, a rolling boil of sounds. The familiar rhythm took over and, despite myself, I gave the responses. When the decade was finished, she kept going, into the Requiescat: eternal rest … perpetual light … rest in peace.