“Nice drop of milk for the tea, wha,” she calls out the window.
I nod, and hurry on. I never know if she is making statements or asking questions. When I enter the house, I sniff the air, then tuck my nose under my jumper and smell my top half. A homely smell comes from my body, somewhere between old milk and red meat on the turn. I sit at the kitchen table and trace my route on greaseproof paper. Today, I walked a staircase dangling on a fishing rod.
9
I GO INTO the hoard-room to find some things that I can bring as presents to my sister’s family—I’m going to surprise them with a visit. There’s a small pile of paper crumbs beside the notebook pile, and a scattering of droppings like burnt rice, the aftermath of a paper feast. At least the house mice appreciate quality notepaper. I quite like the idea of sharing my home with small creatures that come alive at night, like toys in a children’s story. I go downstairs, open the laptop and look up what diseases mice carry. The web site says: “Leptospirosis, Murine Typhus, Rickettsialpox, Tularamia, Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis and potentially Bubonic Plague.”
I like the way it says “potentially” bubonic plague, as if the other diseases were a given. The mice on the Internet look like squirrels with shaved tails. The wiry tails look mean and unfinished, so I’ll turn my house mice into squirrels. I take a scissors out of the kitchen drawer, cut two strips of bristles from the sweeping brush and bring them upstairs. I lean one strip against the bottom of the door of the hoardroom, and the other against the jamb. Then I squeeze some glue along the tips of the bristles, and pull the door almost shut. It looks like a car wash for an elf’s car. If the bristles successfully squirrelify one mouse, I will make more for his friends. I don’t mind mice walking around my house—or maybe they think it’s their house but I don’t want to catch potential bubonic plague and have my own private Black Death. I will make them a disinfectant footbath. I go down to the kitchen and take a saucer out of the cupboard. I pour in a dash of disinfectant, carry it upstairs and put it outside the hoardroom. When the mice have hospital-clean feet and sweeping-brush tails, they can be my pets. I’ll call them Mork and Mindy, after the two friendly aliens in the television show. I write the mouse diseases in my notebook, then I write a List of Old Disease Names That Sound More Like The Thing Than Their Modern Names: “Dropsy, Yellow Jack, Puerperal Exhaustion, Scrofula, Consumption (I especially like Galloping Consumption), Ablepsy, Ague, Biliousness, Boils, Canker, Carbuncle, Cowpox, Pox, French Pox, Great Pox, Grocer’s Itch, Milk Leg, Gout, Quinsy, Rag-Picker’s Disease, St. Vitus’s Dance.”
I leave the house, and walk to one of the dark little shops nearby that sells an unpredictable range of goods. A middle-aged man sits smoking behind the till, next to a gas heater that smells of warm evil. He looks annoyed to see a customer.
“I always wanted to smoke,” I say.
He puffs out some smoke.
“I tried but I couldn’t inhale.”
He digs his thumb into his nose and roots around.
“Where are the toys?” I ask.
He points and I follow his finger down to the toys. The shop bulges with goods. The hooks on the walls are crammed, the shelves are bursting, the containers in the middle heave with stuff. Everything is covered with a whisper of dust. There are mouse traps, clothes pegs, glow-in-the-dark Jesuses, bicycle lights, insoles for shoes, cooking utensils, potpourri, picture frames, notebooks, toys, pots, pans, calculators, pens and pencils, bathroom furniture, toiletries.
I try to remember the ages of my niece and nephew, but all I know is that the boy is smaller than the girl. I pick up a net of marbles for him and a plastic cooker for her, bring them to the counter and pay the silent man. He hands me my change.
“Thanks,” I say. “I hope you have a merry Christmas and a happy new year.”
“It’s April,” he says, his jaw hanging like a door that won’t close.
“I know, but I may not be in here again this year. I rarely visit my sister.”
His face has even less welcome in it, so I take the toys and leave the shop. I walk to Phibsborough, and wait for the bus that crosses the city and goes straight to my sister’s house. When the bus comes, I sit upstairs and look at the tops of people’s heads as they get on. That’s the part of their body they forget about, their upper scalps are not as well-tended as their faces. A girl with a wide pretty face gets on and sits beside me. She looks unhappy, which surprises me; if I looked like her, I would be laughing all the way to the mirror. Every time the bus stops, I look out at the passengers getting off and on. I picture plus signs over the heads of the people getting on and minus signs over the heads of the ones getting off. When we reach the city centre, there are so many minuses I fear I’ll be the only passenger left, but a swell of pluses immediately gets on. The bus stops at the traffic lights on O’Connell Bridge, next to the statue of Daniel O’Connell surrounded by Winged Victories. One of the Victories holds a snake casually in one hand and an axe in the other. She stares hard at me, her eyes insisting on mine no matter how far back or forward I lean, accusing me of doing too much of something or not enough of something.
“What did I do?” I ask her.
“What?”
I get off the bus on the main road of my sister’s suburb. The silence of the place is a shock, all hush and muffle and muted shop lighting. A woman passes by with a face so stuck that I think she’s had a stroke. Her hair is yellow, her face is orange, her lips are red. She looks so coloured-in, it’s probably plastic surgery. I walk quickly to my sister’s house, crunch through the gravel in her driveway and ring the bell. My sister answers the door with a smile like watery sunshine.
“Surprise!” I shout.
I hold out the presents. Her eyes move north and her mouth moves south and her face settles into dismay.
“Vivian, what are you doing here?”
“I thought I’d surprise you and the children. I’m using my initiative, like you always told me to.”
I try to talk brightly, but I don’t know exactly how to inject luminosity into my voice so I just aim for a higher pitch. My sister’s whole body seems to turn in on itself. She stands back and I walk into the hall and sniff the air. It smells of soap and dinner. She closes the door and leads me into the kitchen, which is huge, with black surfaces and a white floor. It looks empty.
“Where is everything?” I ask.
“Where’s what?”
“Your kitchen stuff—the kettle, microwave, cooker, fridge.”
She starts opening the black doors and points to the appliances behind those doors.
“Why are you keeping the kitchen a secret?” I ask. “Are you hiding it from someone?”
My sister starts throwing words at me, whole lists of words, words that she took from her architect or her friends, words that mean nothing, words that say nothing, words from advertisements and brochures and people who sell things for a living: “Rain-sensing…utilitarian…space…ergonomic…clean lines…neutral…timeless…transitional…accents…”
“What accent does this kitchen have?” I ask.
She looks at me through a scrunch of eyelids, her opinion of me seeping through her eyeballs and dripping (plip) onto the timeless floor. She starts talking about Angelique’s splashbacks and Saoirse’s counters. Her friends all sound like bridalwear shops or Gaelic chieftains. Then she points out the window to an L-shaped concrete pond with giant goldfish in it.
“How do you like my new water feature?” she asks.
“Did you overfeed the goldfish?” I ask. “They look mutant.”
My sister withers.
“They’re koi, Vivian. They symbolise strength and perseverance.”
I look at the fish. They’ve certainly persevered at eating if they grew to that size.
“I have a water feature too,” I say.
“Oh?”
“An outdoor one, it came with the property.”
My great-aunt’s house was the first thing I got that my sister didn’t g
et. I call it a property around her to emphasise ownership.
“Don’t be silly,” she says, “Great-Aunt Maud had no time for such things.”
“There’s a leaking drainpipe that drips water onto the concrete around the drain,” I say. “If I crouch down on my hunkers and close my eyes, I can pretend I’m in the grounds of a miniature palace, surrounded by fountains and elves.”
My sister doesn’t answer. She copes better with her own words than mine.
“Where are Lucy and Oisin?” I ask. “They’re in the living room.”
“I want to see them,” I say. “I have presents.”
My sister grips her clean-lined counter.
“Sure,” she says in a sewn-up voice. “They’d love to see you.”
She leads the way to the living room, where the children are sitting in front of the television. They look at me, then look back at the television.
“I have presents for you!” I shout, because children’s presenters on television always shout and children seem to like it, but these children just look frightened. The boy runs to his mother and she nudges him in my direction. I take out the cooker and give it to the girl. She rips the box open and starts to play with it. The boy edges closer to me and I hand him the net of marbles. He takes it, looks at it, then looks at my bag.
“Does he want my bag?” I ask my sister.
The boy’s face curls up and he starts to wail “Not fair” and “Lucy got big present!”
“Vivian, get me a weighing scales.”
I try to say this with authority.
“Why?”
“David’s marbles are heavier than Lucy’s cooker. Gram for toy gram, he wins.”
“Oh, Vivian.”
The world is in the way she says my name, and it’s not a good thing. I ask my sister for a glass of water and while she’s gone, I say “hugger-mugger” over and over to the children. Their ears sharpen and they look from me to the door.
“Hugger-mugger,” I hiss. “Hugger-mugger hugger-mugger hugger-mugger HUGGER-MUGGER!”
My sister rushes in.
“Vivian?”
“I’m trying to reintroduce forgotten words back into the system,” I say. “Targeting children has a better chance of success.”
She claps her hands and says, “Lucy and Oisin, run into the kitchen, we’ll have a treat!”
The children barrel past and my sister turns to me.
“You need to go home now. The children have had enough excitement.”
I pick up my bag and follow her to the front door. As I move past her, she says, “And Vivian? Maybe you should think about showering once in a while.”
I thought I showered twice in a while, but my whiles must be longer than hers. I say goodbye, but my sister’s face is already turned back to the kitchen with her children and hidden appliances. The visit has been two-thirds successful because only one child cried and their mother didn’t. I walk home, retracing the route the bus took, ignoring the shortcuts. The yellow bus stops mark my progress and, when I get tired, I imagine them clapping invisible hands and cheering me on. If I follow the route exactly, this will cancel out the awkward smudge of the visit. When I let myself in the front door, I find a note from the city council advertising its annual collection of old furniture and junk in a couple of days’ time. I note the date; I have nothing to throw out, but I have all to find. I unfurl the map of Dublin and plot my route—just the walking part—and trace it onto greaseproof paper. Today I covered a headless armless man, sliced vertically in two.
10
I WAKE EARLY and listen to the wind in the fireplace in my bedroom. It’s loud, and pieces of soot are blowing down the chimney. This is good; I need a big wind that could turn into a cyclone, because today I’m going to visit Yellow Road and Emerald Street. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the cyclone carried Dorothy to Oz, and she followed the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald Palace to find her way home. If I find these coloured roads in Dublin, I might find my way home too. I pull on a jumper and jeans and a pair of my great-aunt’s shoes that are one size too big. They are a light grey that could pass for silver. If I had red shoes, I’d have to decide whether to go with the silver-shoed Dorothy in the book or the red-shoed Dorothy in the film. I go to the bathroom and wedge toilet paper in the toes to make them fit better. My silver-shoed walk is more of a clomp, but I plan on being lifted off by a cyclone so I shouldn’t have to walk both ways.
I eat breakfast, put a notebook and pen in my bag and set off. I walk to a discount shop in Phibsborough—I can’t go back to the one I visited yesterday because I’ve already wished the man a happy Christmas—and choose a yellow ball, a yellow colouring book and a yellow pen. I also find a plastic bracelet with a shiny green stone that looks like an emerald. I pay for my yellow and emerald goods, then I walk a little further down the road to a shop that sells “Grocery Sweets Ices.” I don’t know whether ices are ice creams, ice pops or bags of ice, but this is not my concern today. Inside, the shop smells of warm linoleum. Birthday cards are stacked in front of the window, faded into pastels by the sun. Fluorescent cardboard stars hang from shelves, advertising bargains on toilet paper and baked beans and custard. I go to the rack selling pouches of sweets, and find a pouch of Emerald sweets. I don’t know how a pouch differs from a bag, but I suspect there are kangaroos involved. At the counter, there are jars of sweets on the shelves and chocolate bars piled on the counter behind a Perspex cover that makes them look like museum exhibits. Looking at them gives me the spits, and I have to close my mouth so that I don’t drool aloud. I love sweets. I love sweets out of packets and sweets out of boxes and sweets out of tins and tubs, but, most of all, I love sweets out of jars. When I’ve paid for my Emeralds, I leave the shop, take my notebook out of my bag, and write a list of my favourite sweets: “Marshmallows, Candy Cigarettes, Sherbet Fountains, Bullseyes, Fried Eggs, Toffees, Apple Drops, Pips, Chocolate Brazil Nuts, Apple Jacks, Sherbet Flying Saucers, Jelly Tots, Popping Candy, Wham Bars, Fizzy Cola Bottles, Dip-dabs, Love Hearts, Chocolate Mice, Jelly Beans, Sherbet Lemons, Sugared Almonds, Butter Candy, Rhubarb-and-Custard Sweets, Candy Floss, Fruit Salads, Marshmallow Snowballs, Chocolate Raisins, Teacakes, Candy Necklaces, Fizzy Soothers, Jelly Babies, Refresher Bars, Drumstick Lollipops, Frosties, Parma Violets, Pear Drops.”
Some of the entries on my Sweets List might be better suited to a Buns List (teacakes, for example), but until I make such a list, I will keep them here.
I put my notebook away, head through Phibsborough, and walk higher and higher up Mobhi Road until it turns into Ballymun Road. I like roads with names of whole suburbs in them: it’s grand and ambitious and a little bit hopeless. I turn onto Collins Avenue after the yellow church, pass the university and go through the Swords Road junction—another suburb of a road. After a left and a right, I’m on Yellow Road, which, I’m disappointed to see, is grey. I’d expected a yellow surface or yellow walls, or even a yellow cloud dangling over the road, but never mind: I’ve brought my own yellow. I take out the ball and colouring book and pen and lay them on the street next to the sign. I click my heels together as best I can in these loose shoes, but no sudden gust swoops me to Oz, so I walk back to the main road, find a bus stop and catch the next bus to town. When I get on, the bus is quite full. A steam of heat hits me, along with the mushroomy tang of unwashed underthings that could be bottled as The Smell of Dublin Bus.
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