by Doreen Finn
He smiles, a proud, proprietorial grin that can’t help itself. ‘I have the greatest child ever born. Annalie. She’s 10, and amazing.’
‘You lucky man.’ The words are out, hanging between us. I want to take them back, but I can’t.
‘I am. I’m very lucky.’ Adam blows on his hands. ‘Christ, it’s freezing. So anyway, what about your folks?’
‘They’re both dead.’ I tug the belt on my coat. It feels strange to talk about them. It’s not something I do easily. A boarded-up house, that’s my family. Doors, locks, entry difficult at best. ‘That’s actually why I came back here. My mother died a few months ago.’
Adam offers sympathy, which I sidestep. Another day, possibly, but not now.
A taxi swishes past. I’d like to ask Adam in, but I’m not sure what that will mean, or where I even want to take things. Next time. Next time I’ll offer coffee.
He makes it easier for me. ‘Look, I’m going to turn to ice here, and so will you. You don’t have enough extra flesh on you to keep you warm.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Seriously though. We can do this again, another night. Somewhere different.’
‘I’d like that.’
His forefinger is icy as he trails it down my cheek. ‘I like you, Doctor Perry. There’s something about you that I don’t find in most women I meet.’
Of course I should respond, but what can I say that won’t sound contrived? Words, once my greatest strength, consistently fail me in moments like this when I need them most.
‘And next time, I’ll invite myself in.’
‘Deal.’
He leans towards me, kisses my forehead. ‘See you soon. Sleep well.’
It’s only eleven, but tiredness lies heavy on my eyelids. Adam hails a taxi and waves as it pulls away.
The knocker bangs against the front door as it closes. The sound is hollow, and it echoes through the empty house.
CHAPTER 13
The photograph of Andrew was taken when he was 16, and good-looking in a way that no one ever really is at that age. There is a row of photos of him, five pictures taken at varying stages of his life. A toddler holding a kitten aloft. A small boy in rubber boots, standing in a field. One photograph of him astride the carrier of an adult’s bike, and two others showing him with his guitar. I touch my thumb to his freeze-framed images. I don’t know who took the photos; Maude probably. Maybe my father took the early ones. My mother had never owned a camera, hadn’t thought to document her children’s lives. The first picture of me had been taken on my Communion day. I was 7, at odds with the white dress and the ridiculous veil that had been forced onto my head. There are no baby pictures of me, no mother-and-child smiles on the wall. The only image I have of my father is a small black-and-white snapshot from my parents’ wedding day. I’d stolen it from a drawer years before, a still of him in a sober dark suit, his hair neatly combed to the side. He had his arm stiffly on my mother’s shoulder, public affection making him uncomfortable. My mother, in a pale suit, looked equally ill at ease, her new wedding ring prominent on her left hand. What made you get married? I’ve always wondered. Where are the obvious signs of love, or even connection?
I’d loved Isaac obsessively. It’s the only reason I can see for being with someone, for putting up with all the shit and the marriage to someone else and the non-availability at the only times that actually matter when you’re in love with someone. So Christmas I spent alone, Labour weekend, Memorial Day, all the big holidays when everyone has somewhere to go to with someone they care about. Everyone except me. I languished in bookshops, worked on my publications, attended readings, the cinema, walked the grubby streets of the Lower East Side, careful of stepping on manholes that blow steam in the air without warning, past the laundromats and the Puerto Rican market. If an invitation to a party, a barbeque, a Thanksgiving dinner came my way, I accepted. Americans are the truly hospitable people, their inclination to include everyone a genuine part of who they are. Irish people are effusive, especially with strangers. Suggestions to meet up are easily thrown around, yet rarely followed up with an invitation.
Partly to ward off the disappointment that wound itself in coils around my heart, but mostly to keep myself from reaching for the nearest bottle, I reminded myself how good it was to be free to do my own thing, while my lover put on a show with his heiress wife and their circle of successful friends. But ultimately I was on my own, and I hated him for it, then hated myself more for tolerating it. He should have left her. If he had loved me as he’d claimed to, he would have left her.
I loved him. I touched him constantly, watched him as he slept, burrowed into him, seeking out the temporary solace he afforded me. Always seeking.
I don’t need a therapist to tell me that what I seek is my father. You’d think that by now I would have moved on from all that.
I want to avoid becoming my mother. She had never seemed like a real mother to me, not in the way that other girls’ mothers were. She didn’t wait for me to come home from school, cared little for my stories or my friends. She had never sought out my company, like I observed other mothers doing with their daughters. Even as a child I was more like a lodger, always feeling I was in the way, ever wary of disturbing the fragile balance of her moods, impotent as distant storms in the cold face of her fury. When I was pregnant, the prospect of imitating my mother had horrified me. Her sharp edges were flint on the tenderest parts of my skin, her coldness freezing me with a mere glance. In Isaac, I was able to leave my mother behind. He enabled me to be someone other than the nuisance I was to her, the rock that kept her grounded to a life she clearly didn’t wish to lead. I never knew what caused my mother’s darkness, her cruelty. Certainly, I brought out the worst in her. She was able to be around Maude and my brother, other people, play bridge, talk to neighbours, but for some reason I unlocked whatever tiny door sealed up her blackest night, and out it came, gushing towards me in torrents, sweeping me away in its slipstream. The mask was for others; I got the uncut reality.
I carry the pictures of Andrew downstairs and hang them on the living room wall. They deserve to be there instead of on my mother’s bedside locker. She’s not going to monopolise him any more. Pictures of the dead should grace the walls of every house. Andrew and I became so adept at not saying the names of dead people that we effectively erased them from our memories. Our father, Tom. Maude’s husband, Pat, dead since I was 7, driven to a stroke by bad debts and creditors, and now Andrew.
Many cultures celebrate their dead, give them their own days of remembrance. Their names are spoken freely and without worry. Candles are lit, parties held in their honour. Mexicans have Dia de los Muertos, and the dead come out to play, dance, live again, shaking their skeletons till their clothes fall away. Candles burn in front of photos of the muertos, food is cooked and eaten, stories told. It’s sad, in the way that death is always sad, but it points too towards a greater understanding of life. We’re always moving towards death, and its inevitability should be a reassurance, but we shy away from it, wear clothes that are too young for us, fix our faces so we can fool others. And all we do is fool ourselves.
In this house, too, we moved away from acceptance. Photos were not displayed, their names and stories wiped away like chalk from a board.
That was my mother’s way, and Andrew and I simply followed her lead, knowing no better. Mindful of upsetting her, we stayed away from the topic of our father until we became so used to not talking about him that we never did. Saying father, saying his name, saying Dad, felt awkward on my tongue, the unfamiliar enunciation wrong somehow.
In the secret conversations inside my head, he existed as I sifted through my memories of him, any recollections that I could paste in my mental scrapbook.
In the fading light, the front room is cosy. I lit a fire when I came home from work and it hisses in the grate, spitt
ing occasional embers onto the wooden floor. If I stay here, I’ll have to put in central heating. For now, the fires will suffice. A log collapses ashily and subsides. The photo of my father I place on the mantelpiece. He is a snuffed candle. Gone. How different would my life be had he lived?
My father, still in his labouring clothes, the rough wool trousers and heavy cotton shirts of the small farmer, used to sit me on his knee each evening before dinner and read with me. My finger traced the shapes of the letters as he showed me how to make sense of them. He smelled of animals and earth, a scent that could never be fully removed, regardless of how hard he scrubbed with the transparent bar of Pears soap that my mother kept in the bathroom. How my mother hated the farmhouse bathroom, with its leaking taps and noisy rusting pipes, the omnipresent cold air that rippled through the ill-fitting window. She’d tried, with nice soap and clean towels, to bring some semblance of city living to the flat, bleak countryside, but it was a lost battle. There was always too much opposition, too many filthy hands and boots for her ever to have had a chance.
Invariably in his stockinged feet, to avoid having my mother complain bitterly about tracking dirt across the floor she’d swept several times that day, my father sat with me and my books. His big work boots he left outside the kitchen door, scraped clean and ready for the early morning call to milking, that rural alarm clock that never needed to be set. He kissed me profusely every time I read a sentence without a mistake. Even at the age of 4, I’d wished that it were my mother who spent her days milking cows and tilling fields, leaving my father to me. One evening I touched his face, his end-of-day skin farm-dusty, jaws roughening under their daily growth. My father caught my hand and kissed it, his lips flat on my palm, my entire hand fitting over his mouth. I squealed as he blew against my skin, tickling me. I squirmed, the coarse fabric of his trousers rough on my bare legs, but I didn’t say anything for fear of hurting his feelings.
My mother turned from where she spooned potatoes onto plates, disapproval unfolding in the steaming air. ‘Tom, if you’ve nothing better to do than excite the child, go and get me some more coal. And Eva, get up off your father. Go and wash your hands.’
That’s what I recall, my mother’s unending dissatisfaction, curdling in the fridge of her bad humour. Andrew was lucky he was at school, away from the strangeness of home. I was the one who played far away from my mother. I found kittens, and birds with broken wings, named all the cows in the small herd, chased hens and fell in love with words.
My child, my father had liked to call me. Come here, my child. Sit beside me, my child. My child, my child. My mother had never once referred to me thus.
Maude is watching television downstairs. Canned laughter and applause reach me through the floor. Imported American sitcoms. Maude loves them.
I can sit here alone, or I can go and buy something to drink, or I can go downstairs to Maude.
I go and visit Maude.
CHAPTER 14
Her name is Aelita, and she arrives ten minutes early. She shakes my hand as she introduces herself. A child holds on to the tail of her jacket. He is beautiful, with huge grey eyes and those high cheekbones so familiar among the Eastern Europeans I see around. I never know what to say to children, so I just smile at him.
In the kitchen, I show Aelita the cleaning supplies. I’ve placed them in a basket on the table.
‘I’ll need you to clean downstairs too.’ I point at the floor.
‘Clean, yes.’ She mimes sweeping.
‘No, the flat downstairs.’ I show her the door beside the kitchen that leads down to Maude’s flat. It is unlocked. It always is, in case an emergency should arise.
Aelita will come once a week, for three hours. I don’t know if it’s sufficient time, or too much, but she’ll clean for Maude as well, so she should have enough to do. She hangs her coat on the hook outside the kitchen, above the shoe rack. She wears a grey sweatshirt with Cape Cod lettered in navy across the front, and sagging leggings. Her blonde hair is dark at the roots and she has pinned it in a haphazard bun. A diamante butterfly winks in the folds of her hair.
‘I start today, yes?’ she asks, reaching already for the basket.
‘If you like.’
‘Good.’
When I check on Aelita an hour later, she is mopping the hall floor. She has tied a green scarf around her head, and her face is red from the exertion of pushing the heavy mop over the floorboards. She stops when she sees me.
‘I dry floor too.’ She rests her hands on the top of the mop. The child sits at the foot of the stairs, pushing a small yellow car over and under his legs. I hesitate. Should I offer him the television? A biscuit? He keeps watch on his mother. I feel a pinch of guilt at keeping his mother from being with him. He is too small to be at school.
Maude has remained opposed to the idea of getting someone in to clean. ‘I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea of paying someone to do what I should be doing myself.’
‘It’s only a bit of help, Maude.’ The argument circled us, going nowhere.
‘We do our own cleaning in this house.’
‘I know, and we can still do it. This is just a bit of extra help, that’s all.’
We sat in Maude’s living room. The public health nurse had just left. Maude hadn’t wanted her to visit.
‘I’m fine, nurse’ was all she had said when the nurse arrived.
‘I know you are. This is just routine.’ She examined Maude’s leg, about which she’d been complaining. ‘You need to stay off that leg for a week or two.’ She wrapped a bandage around the offending calf. ‘I’m sure your granddaughter is a great help to you.’
‘Grand-niece. She’s not bad.’ Maude smiled at me over the nurse’s shoulder. ‘She’s threatening to get a cleaner.’
The nurse sat back on her heels, examined the leg, then stood up. ‘Good idea. Anything that’ll keep you off your feet for a while.’
‘I can’t be here sitting around while some poor girl dusts the room. It wouldn’t be fair.’
So I have arranged for Aelita to come on Wednesday afternoons while Maude plays bridge. She gets a lift from her partner, and I finish school early so I’m there to let Aelita in.
There are toy cars somewhere in the attic, old Matchbox miniatures that Andrew collected in a trunk that had belonged to my mother’s parents. I wonder about offering them to the child. He sees me observing him, and he stills the circling of the yellow car.
Aelita finishes the floor. ‘Down now, yes?’ The child follows her closely, his hand reaching for the hem of her sweatshirt. The door to downstairs closes with a decisive click.
I offer Aelita coffee when she finishes. Darkness has slipped like ink over the afternoon. The old clock on the kitchen wall ticks insistently. Five o’clock. Maude will be home at any minute. I wonder if she’ll notice the scrubbed tiles, the clean floors, then dismiss the thought instantly. Of course she’ll notice. Maude is house-proud.
I hand over the money we agreed on the phone. Guilt edges its way into my head as I pay this woman who has cleaned my house. I don’t know why. I pay Isabel to clean my tiny apartment every week and it doesn’t cost me a thought. It’s different here, somehow. Middle-class guilt still makes it hard to employ people domestically. Maybe it’s easier if your money is newly won.
She refuses coffee. The boy keeps a proprietorial hand on his mother. I’ll find Andrew’s Matchbox cars in time for next Wednesday.
I point out the bus stop. Aelita shrugs, amused. ‘Yes. We come to here on bus.’
Of course they did. I am about to extend my hand, but Aelita steps out the door. Halfway down the granite steps, she pauses. A hat is produced from her large bag. She pulls it down over the child’s hair. It is shaped like a bear, with rounded ears, white knitted eyes and a black nose. She ties it under the boy’s chin. He tugs at a piece o
f her hair. He sees me watching, and, feeling foolish, I wave, then close the door quickly.
CHAPTER 15
Adam’s house in Sandymount sits among a row of similar dwellings on a quiet street just off the main drag. The vegetable-oil car sits, abandoned for the weekend. Salt has dried on its paintwork. Feathery grasses drift over the neighbour’s low wall, dry now in this wintry air. The garden is quieted by the season, dry and wreathed in shades of brown. Two enormous terracotta tubs overflow with potting compost and chickweed. Some brave late-autumn lilies fight the herbaceous clutter, their deep-pink petals haemorrhaging colour into the monochrome. A wrought-iron table and two chairs loiter in the corner, dead leaves piled on their surfaces. The sea air is heavy, thick with salt and the promise of rain. The saline breeze rattles the shrivelled leaves on the trees. Overhead, seagulls wheel like bits of discarded paper, screaming at each other.
Adam opens the door before I have time to knock. ‘Come in, come in,’ he says, kissing my cheek before hugging me. We were not a family of embracers, and even now the practice sometimes leaves me self-conscious, awkward in the uncertainty of how exactly I should react. Not so with Adam. The hug returned, I smile at him, handing over a bunch of lilies. Gorgeous flowers, they were my mother’s least favourite. Flowers of death, she called them.
Adam ushers me inside, closing the door behind me. ‘My God, it’s freezing.’ He is wearing a slightly more relaxed version of his weekday clothes. Still academic-looking, more of a handsome professor than a secondary school history teacher. ‘Too early to be so damn cold.’
Adam inhales the lilies. Wine wouldn’t have been a good choice of gift. Plenty of alcoholics don’t mind buying alcohol for other people, but I’ve never been one of them. If I’m buying, I’m drinking. And that’s no good.