Lifesaving for Beginners

by Ciara Geraghty

  My father’s name is not Kenneth. It’s Leonard. But when he first introduced himself to my mother, she thought he said Kenneth. Of course, he was too polite to correct her. And a little awestruck, to be honest. He presumed that a woman like Mum would never be interested in a man like him, so the mistake was inconsequential. When she decided that she wanted to see him again, he agreed. She only found out, by accident, months later that his name was actually Leonard. And by then it was too late. She said it was too late. It would feel odd, she said. To call him anything other than Kenneth. In fact, lots of people call him Kenneth now. He says he doesn’t mind.

  I get up from the table and walk into the kitchen. In the oven there is a dish of roast vegetables and a bowl of mashed potatoes. I get oven gloves, carry the dishes into the dining room, set them on the table. In that time, Dad has managed to carve two slices of meat. Mum is still scribbling in her notebook and Ed takes a sip of wine from a glass and tries not to wince. He doesn’t really like wine. He likes the idea of liking wine.

  I keep up a kind of chatter that could best be described as idle.

  ‘You’ll have two scoops of spud, Ed.’

  ‘And there’s some roast pumpkin for you, Mum. I know you’re partial to roast pumpkin.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Dad, none of your vegetables have been anywhere near the aubergine. I made sure.’ Dad doesn’t like aubergine. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say he hates it but his displeasure at the leathery purple skin of the vegetable is fairly acute. And because he so rarely voices an opinion, especially a negative one, everybody goes out of their way to ensure that aubergine never crosses his path, Monday to Saturday. An exception is made on Sunday because of Ed and Mum, who love it. As for me, I’m pretty non-committal.

  I sit down. Mum closes her notebook, pats the bun of hair at the back of her head, like she’s making sure it’s still there. Ed pours milk into a wine glass. Dad puts a slice of meat on everybody’s plate and tucks a napkin into the collar of his shirt.

  We eat.

  The silence isn’t strained but it’s there. It’s always been there. We are not a family who sit together for meals, Monday to Saturday. But, for some reason, Mum insists on the Sunday dinner tradition. As if perhaps she read somewhere that this was the kind of thing that families did.

  We eat.

  Mum cuts her vegetables and meat into tiny pieces, then spears one tiny morsel of everything – potato, pumpkin, a sliver of lamb and, of course, the controversial aubergine – with her fork and steers the food into her mouth, which opens only at the very last second, and even then it’s only a slit of an opening, barely wide enough to get the food through, but she manages, nonetheless. Then the mouth closes and the chewing begins. At least ten careful chews before she allows herself to swallow. She is pedantic about chewing. ‘Eat slowly,’ she always told me and Ed.

  ‘Don’t speak with your mouth full.’

  ‘Chew carefully.’

  Some people have a fear of flying. Or spiders. Or lollipop ladies. Mum was afraid of choking. Of me or Ed choking. That’s how I knew she loved us.

  I say, ‘So . . . how’s the new book coming along?’ Mum waits until she has chewed her ten chews and taken a huge gulp of water – just to be sure – before she speaks.

  She says, ‘Difficult.’ She shakes her head. ‘Difficult.’

  I say, ‘Oh.’

  She says, ‘As you know, the story is told through a series of letters from the Archbishop to the Diocesan manager and so the narrative tone must be quite constrained, which makes it . . .’ She stops.

  I say, ‘Difficult?’

  She says, ‘Yes.’

  We eat.

  Dessert is home-made. Dad has several sweet teeth and Ed got him Nigella Does Dessert for his last birthday. I don’t know why, as Dad has never expressed an interest in either baking or in Nigella Lawson, who is like the polar opposite of the women he usually favours: Mum; Judi Dench; Margaret Thatcher, circa 1980. I think it’s because the book was fifty cents in the local charity shop. The price is written in pencil inside the cover. Ed loves charity shops. His room is full of other people’s rubbish.

  Since he got the book, Ed and Dad meet in the kitchen on Sunday mornings and bake something. They do it chronologically. Today, they’ve done page forty-three, which is a chocolate fudge cake. They serve it warm with a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side. I usually have a coffee and a cigarette for dessert but not on Sundays. Not since Nigella. She has made them surpass themselves, Ed and Dad. That’s what I tell them most Sundays. That they’ve surpassed themselves. Even Mum, who has the appetite of a tiny bird, concedes to a sliver of cake. For a while, all you can hear is the scrape of forks against plates. Forks aren’t great implements to eat ice cream with. You really need a spoon. At times like these, you can understand why children lick plates, you really can.

  I make coffee. A decaf espresso for Mum, a cappuccino for Dad and Ed – with cocoa powder sprinkled on the top – and a black coffee for me. I grind the beans and I set up the machine and I sit on the worktop, as I always do, and wait. I love the noise of the machine. The gurgle and the splutter of it. And the smell. That strong, earthy smell.

  The tray is not in its usual spot: in the cupboard beside the fridge. Mum says it might be in the utility room when I ask her. And it is. It’s on the counter, covered in papers and bills. She insists on taking care of the household paperwork, even though, if Dad did it, there’d be less chance of the electricity getting cut off twice a year. I think she feels like it’s her link to the real world. To how the real world works. It’s a fairly tenuous link.

  On the tray are flyers for the local supermarket, unopened bills, a handwritten letter from a fan – three foolscap pages – and a couple of coupons for the local taxi company. I tilt the tray and they tumble onto the counter, and that’s when I see them. The envelopes. Three envelopes. Identical. Cream envelopes with a window. A British stamp. A registered post sticker on one of them. They’re not from the college. Printed in the window is my name. Ms Katherine Kavanagh. My parents’ address. I haven’t lived at this address for twenty years.

  Somewhere in my head, a pulse begins to beat.

  I pick them up, the three envelopes, and walk into the dining room.

  ‘Mum?’ She looks up from her notebook. Sees me. Sees the envelopes in my hand.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m sorry, Katherine. I meant to forward them to you.’

  ‘When did these arrive?’

  Ed says, ‘Who are they from, Kat?’

  Mum says, ‘Oh, I’m not sure. Recently, I think. The last few weeks, definitely. I’ve been so busy with the book, you see. It’s been . . .’

  ‘Difficult. Yes. We know. You said.’

  Dad steps in. ‘Well, you have them now, Kat. No harm done, eh?’ This is the role he has always played. The middle-man. The referee. The facilitator. The one who rings the bell. The one who says, ‘Enough’.

  I’m at my chair now. The envelopes are in my hand.

  Ed says, ‘Who are they from, Kat?’

  I sit down. Pick up my glass. Drain it. Pour more wine.

  Mum says, ‘Aren’t you driving?’

  Dad says, ‘I’ll take her home.’

  Ed says, ‘That’s an English stamp, isn’t it, Kat? Look, it’s got the Queen on it.’

  I look at the envelopes. A cream queen on a pink background. The postmark is London. I don’t know anyone in London. Except Brona, of course, and she posts everything to the PO Box number I gave her.

  I open the first envelope. Take out the letter. One page. I turn it over. One side of one page. It is written the way I like things to be written. No fancy language. Precise. To the point.

  Ed says, ‘Who’s it from, Kat?’

  Mum says, ‘Edward, don’t put your elbows on the table. And please don’t speak with your mouth full. How many times have I told you that?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  Mum looks at me and says, ‘I beg your pardon?’


  ‘Leave him alone.’

  She picks up her fork. Puts it onto her plate. ‘I’m merely trying to instil some manners in the boy.’

  Dad says, ‘Janet!’ Which is the closest he’ll come to telling her off. He puts his hand on Ed’s shoulder and wanders out of the room, into the kitchen.

  I say, ‘He’s thirty-four years old. He’s not a boy.’ Anger is not something I feel all that often. I’m more inclined towards peevishness. That’s what Thomas used to say anyway. Anger has its two hands round my throat now. It’s strangling me. ‘And he’s not speaking with his mouth full,’ I say. ‘He’s finished.’

  Dad comes back into the room and says, ‘Here’s the coffee.’ He looks at us as if we are an audience and he a reluctant after-dinner speaker. Everything about my father is small. His voice, his size, the portions he eats, his expectations of other people.

  I say, ‘The first letter is dated nearly a month ago.’

  There’s one morsel of cake left on Mum’s plate. She spears it with her fork, dips it in a puddle of melted ice cream, lifts the fork to her mouth, opens, closes, chews her ten chews, swallows, drinks water followed by the merest sip of wine. Then she looks at me and shakes her head. ‘I forgot about them.’ And if this were a normal Sunday, one of the hundreds of Sundays I have sat round this table and watched my mother chewing and swallowing and forgetting about things, that would be that. I would shrug and remind her, or not remind her, depending.

  I don’t do either. I look right at her. ‘The letter is from an adoption agency.’

  ‘An adoption agency?’ She sets her fork down. I nod. My breathing is funny. Jerky. Mum looks at me and it’s like she’s just arrived. She is present. I have her attention.

  I say, ‘Did you know it was a girl?’

  Ed says, ‘Who was a girl?’

  Mum says nothing. Her lips have retreated into a single, thin line.

  I say it again. Louder this time. ‘Did you? Did you know it was a girl?’

  Dad says, ‘Katherine?’

  Ed says, ‘Who was a girl?’

  Mum looks at her plate. She nods.

  ‘Why did you never tell me?’

  ‘I assumed you knew.’ Her voice is low, almost a whisper.

  Ed says, ‘Who was a girl?’

  I look at Ed and shake my head. There are things I need to tell him but I don’t know where to start.

  The thing is, we never discussed it. Afterwards. Maybe it was the shock of the thing. She thought I was in Minnie’s house, revising for a history test on the Normans. I was her only daughter. A fifteen-year-old girl. I remember her arriving at Minnie’s house. Out of breath, like she’d been running, her hair escaping from the bun that she wore, even then. I remember how I felt when I saw her. Relief. That she would sort it out. Make sense of it.

  And she did, I suppose.

  ‘It’s for the best, Katherine.’ That’s what my mother said. Afterwards.

  ‘Do you want to hold your baby?’ the nurse asked. The one with the country accent and the big hands. Her name badge said ‘Ingrid’. Capital letters. ‘INGRID’. I shook my head and they took it away and I signed the document in the places that Mum had marked with an x. ‘It’s for the best, Katherine,’ she said and I nodded and she brought me home and we never talked about it again.

  I open the second envelope. The third one. All from the same person. All saying the same thing. I put them on the table. I push them towards her.

  I say, ‘Read them.’

  She looks at the thin little pile of letters but doesn’t pick them up.

  She says, ‘I think we should talk about this later, Katherine.’ She nods towards Ed as if he can’t see us.

  Ed says, ‘Talk about what?’ He abandons his fork and uses his finger to mop up the last traces of ice cream from his plate. Mum does not tell him not to.

  Dad clears his throat and I know he’s going to say something and I know that once he says the thing he’s going to say, nothing will ever be the same again. Everything will be different. I know it.

  He clears his throat and then he says, ‘Kat had a baby, Ed.’ His voice is like the rest of him: quiet and small. His words are like a blow to the head. I look at him. At his kind, familiar face. It is the bluish-white of shock. He looks old. Properly old. For the first time. There is a shake in his voice. Still, he goes on. ‘She’d be twenty-four by now.’

  Ed looks at me. ‘Why is she writing to you? Does she not have your phone number?’

  ‘She asked the adoption agency to write to me. She wants to see me.’

  Ed says, ‘Does she not want to see me?’

  No one says anything.

  ‘Will she be my little sister?’

  Dad says, ‘You’re her uncle.’

  ‘She can sleep in my bottom bunk.’ Ed stands, heads for the door. ‘I’d better go and tidy my room.’ Ed has never tidied his room in his life. Mrs Higginbotham did it. Or me. Or Dad. He tears up the stairs, stopping at the top.

  ‘Uncle Ed!’ he shouts.

  Dad stretches out his hand and puts it on mine. Just for a moment. Mum looks at the gesture, then opens her mouth as if she is about to say something. Closes it.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ Ed shouts from the top of the stairs.

  ‘UNCLE ED.’

  Dad is asleep in Ant and Adrian’s room. I was worried he might sleep in Mam’s room. He doesn’t snore anymore. He says Celia doesn’t let him.

  I wait till Faith goes to bed and the house goes quiet and the floors start to creak. She goes earlier than usual. Probably because Rob didn’t come over. She told him not to bother, when he rang.

  ‘Get someone else to sing your song. It’s shite anyway, so it is.’

  Faith and Rob sound like Mam and Dad now. Before Dad went to live with Celia in Scotland. I reckon they’ll break up soon, which is a shame because Rob is all right, for an adult. He never tells you that things are good for you and he hates cauliflower and celery as much as I do.

  I put two pillows on the bed and cover them with my duvet, which is made of the same material as the uniform Sully wears when he’s going to the war. I take out the bag from under my bed. It’s got everything I need, even my toothbrush.

  I stop outside Faith’s bedroom door. There’s no sound so I keep going. The stairs are tricky, on account of the creaks. I make it to the sixth one before I drop my bag. When I bend to pick it up, the step creaks. It sounds like an old woman moaning. I nearly drop my bag again.

  I don’t move. I crouch on the sixth step and I listen.

  Nothing.

  Still, I force myself to wait for one minute. I count up to sixty, as slow as I can.

  Nothing.

  I creep down the rest of the stairs.

  The kitchen looks different in the dark. The clock in the shape of Ireland ticks much louder at night-time. When I open the fridge door, the light nearly blinds me.

  I take four EasiSingles, a packet of ham and three strawberry yoghurts. I take two slices of bread out of the breadbin and wrap them in tinfoil. A packet of crackers. A Kit Kat from Faith’s secret chocolate stash that she thinks I don’t know about. I leave the Flake. She’s mad about Flakes.

  I fill my flask with orange juice from the carton, except that I spill some on the floor and then I walk in it by accident. There’s no kitchen roll and the only tea towel I can find is Mam’s favourite one. The one with the recipe for Funky Banana Bread. That’s where she got the idea for the name. I sneak out to the hall and get toilet paper from the downstairs loo and I wipe the kitchen floor and the sole of my shoe with that.

  I haven’t told anyone. Not even Damo. That way, when they ask him, he won’t have to lie and say, ‘I don’t know.’ He can just say, ‘I don’t know,’ and it’ll actually be true.

  Outside, it’s raining. I suppose I should have packed my raincoat. It’s pretty cold too. My anorak probably would have been better than this jacket. I have a torch but I don’t turn it on. I don’t want to run out of
batteries.

  Dad’s going to drive Faith to the airport in the morning. He says he’s going to drive me to school and then drive Faith to the airport. That’s why I have to go now. Otherwise, Dad will drive me to school, and I don’t think I’d make it to the airport on time.

  I check my wallet, which is in the pocket of my jeans. It’s actually Mam’s purse; I don’t have a wallet. I might buy one in Ireland. The money is still there. Three fifty-pound notes and three pound coins and two twenty-pence pieces and the penny. It’s all there.

  The bus stop is at the end of our road. There’s no one there. And there’s no sign of the bus coming. I look at the watch Ant gave me for my ninth birthday. It’s not a kid’s watch, like the Spiderman one that George Pullman has. It’s a proper watch, except the hands light up in the dark, which is good because the torch isn’t working. I think the batteries are dead.

  It’s 00.10, which means the bus should be coming in four minutes. But when I look at the timetable at the bus stop, the time of the last bus is 23.55, which was fifteen minutes ago.

  Coach says you should always have a Plan B. I should have remembered that.

  I sit down on the kerb. I think better when I’m sitting down. It’s probably because the blood doesn’t have as far to go to get to my brain.

  The taximan says, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ when I put out my hand and he pulls over.

  I say, ‘The airport, please.’

  He turns off the engine. Leans his head out of the window. Examines me like Miss Williams does before the school inspectors come.

  ‘The airport?’

  ‘Yes, please. The one in London.’

  ‘There’re a few airports in London town, my son. Did you have a particular one in mind?’

  ‘Eh, Gatwick.’

  ‘Which terminal?’

  That’s the problem when you’re talking to adults. They always end up asking you a question you don’t know the answer to.

  The taximan lights up a cigarette. Blows smoke out of the window. It comes out of his nose as well as his mouth. Sully can do that too. And make smoke rings.

  ‘Goin’ someplace nice, is ya? Spain, maybe. Benny-dorm, eh?’