Her Mother's Daughter

by Alice Fitzgerald

  It’s dark when Mummy wakes us up and says in a whisper, ‘Clare, we’re here.’

  I’ve forgotten where we’re supposed to be, and put my arms around Daddy’s neck when he lifts me out of the car, and close my eyes as Mummy lifts Thomas out the other side. I shiver with the cold of the air and then we’re inside and they carry us upstairs and put us on the bed, take our shoes off and pull the blankets over us.

  ‘We’re here, we’re here,’ I think in my head. I remember where we are and I smile and fall asleep, happy that I don’t have to change into my pyjamas.

  Loud shouts wake me up. I get a shock and wonder what’s happened, if Mummy and Daddy are fighting, and then John and Mary and Sarah run through the door and jump onto our bed. I get up on the bed, too, and we all jump up and down like it’s a bouncy castle. We hold hands and make a circle and Thomas gets up, too, wipes his eyes and bounces in the middle. When we’re out of breath, we all bounce and then fall down on the bed, one on top of the other.

  They all look the same as last time. Mary is so funny. She has mad blonde curls that spring right back to the way they were after you pull them. Kind of like Thomas’s hair but even more springy. She has a button-nose and freckles on her cheeks. Sarah is little, like Thomas, but taller than him, like Mary’s taller than me, because their mummy is tall and ours is short. She has curly hair, too, but not like Thomas’s. They’re bigger curls that bounce every time she moves. I want curly hair. Mummy says mine is wavy and wispy but I want it to be springy. John is the oldest of all of us. He’s twelve and tall and has red hair like wood, much redder than mine and Mummy’s, and bright white skin like the others. All their skin is as white as the tops of my fingernails, even Thomas’s. It’s only me that has darker skin and auburn hair, which goes brighter in the sun. Mummy says that’s because I follow her side of the family. The cunty side.

  ‘Wash yer faces and we’ll show ye the pups,’ says Mary in her high-pitched voice. She speaks so different to me and Thomas that I go a bit red and nod; I don’t want to speak and for them to hear my voice is different to theirs.

  Sarah pulls my hand and I follow; we go down to the bathroom to wash our faces.

  Downstairs, Aunty Joan is in the kitchen with a tea towel in her hands. She puts it down on the table and comes to hug us. She kisses me and Thomas and grabs our cheeks and says how we’ve grown, and then Uncle John comes in and says, ‘Look who’s here,’ which makes us giggle. Then he hugs us and ruffles our hair. He’s tall and strong like Daddy, but he’s thin as a beanpole, Daddy says. Aunty Joan gives us all a muffin each and tells us to get out of here, and we take it with us and run outside.

  It’s cold and the sun isn’t even out yet, but I don’t care. I love the cold air here, and the rush of wind that is so fast and noisy you can hear it at night as you snuggle deeper into bed. The smell is different to home. Here it smells of cows and their poo, and all the muddy grass and the trees that are round the back of the house. It smells good. I breathe it in deep and then cough, because I have some muffin in my mouth and a bit has gone down the wrong way in my throat. There’s just grass as far as I can see, like yesterday there was just the swish-swosh of the sea.

  John leads the way around the side of the house and now I see the trees for the first time, even though I already knew they were there. ‘Wait till ye see this,’ he says, and Sarah grabs my hand and I squeeze it tight with excitement. We go into the hayshed. We walk all the way through to the back, where there is a blanket and lots of newspapers on the ground next to the pile of hay. John puts his finger to his lips to say shush, and we all tiptoe after him. I turn round to look at Thomas and Sarah who are holding hands and giggling, and that’s when I hear the little high-pitched whimpers.

  Pretty Lady is lying on the blanket and beside her are lots of little balls of black-and-white fluffy puppies. I gasp, and Mary pulls me forward and we kneel down on the floor. I’m sure Pretty Lady knows me from last time, because she sniffs at my hand and wags her tail so it thumps off the ground, like she’s happy to see me. I stretch out my arm and rub one. Then the teeny balls of fluff start getting up, but they can’t walk much so they wobble around and we all start laughing. One comes over to me and I pick it up. It’s so small and warm and fluffy, and I can hold it easily in one hand, but I’m scared to drop it, so I hold it in two. It licks my hands.

  ‘He likes you,’ says Mary, which makes me smile a big smile.

  ‘Is it a boy?’ I ask.

  Sarah nods.

  He is white apart from a black dot on his back and three black paws. He’s the cutest of all of them because he’s different. John shows me how to tell if he is a girl or a boy, and I turn him over and look between his legs and I can see he has a little willy like Thomas. We all giggle. I count how many brothers and sisters he has. Four. I nuzzle my face into his tummy. He’s so warm. I decide right then and there that I love him. ‘Do they have names?’ I ask, holding him while Thomas rubs his back.

  ‘Not yet,’ says Mary, who is playing with the pup in Sarah’s arms. John is holding another.

  One is black, so we decide to call him Blackie. One is black and white all over and she’s a girl, so we call her Fluffy, like the fluffy clouds in the sky. John wants to call the one he’s holding Handsome, so it goes with Pretty Lady. Mary and Sarah call the one they have Freckles because it has lots of little brown spots. That leaves the one I have in my hands.

  ‘Sooty!’ It comes to me straight away, like it was meant to be all the time. It’s like his paws have been dipped in soot from the chimney.

  ‘Sooty!’ says Thomas, rubbing him on the head.

  ‘Sooty’s for a girl!’ says John.

  But I don’t care. Sooty, Sooty, Sooty. I say it in my head and rub him under the ears and on his forehead and his tummy. He touches my face with his paw and I wiggle my nose into his fur and scrunch up my nose. I love you, Sooty, I say in my head. I love you so much. And I remember what Mummy says when she swears to something and it’s so, so true. I swear I love you, Sooty, I say in my head, God can strike me down if I’m lying.

  We stay in the hayshed with the pups until Aunty Joan shouts for us to come inside for lunch. We eat cold ham, turkey, bread with thick, yummy butter that stays in lumps when you put it on the bread. Yum, yum, yum. Mummy takes the knife off me to spread it properly, but I don’t want her to because it’s so yummy like that. It’s not healthy, she says quietly. Then I make an effort to spread it down better, because of the lips-and-hips rule. We sit around the table and gobble it up as quick as we can and go straight back to the pups. We crawl up to the top of the piles of hay and we bring the pups up, and Pretty Lady comes too, and we make sure they stay on our laps and don’t go wandering over to the edge like naughty boys and girls.

  ‘Let’s go and show them the treehouse!’ shouts John all of a sudden.

  ‘Kewl!’ says Mary.

  ‘Kewl!’ says Sarah.

  The way we speak sounds so different to the way they speak and they laugh a bit at our accent, so I decide I want to sound like them. ‘Kewl,’ I say, and then Thomas says it too: ‘Kewl!’

  We climb down carefully, and I am so careful to keep Sooty close to my chest and not squeeze him against the hay or let him fall because he would get hurt a lot. My Sooty. My teeny-weeny, soft, fluffy Sooty. ‘Can we take the pups?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah! Let’s take them!’ shouts Sarah, and we go out of the hayshed with the pups in our arms and walk towards the trees. Me and Mary walk side-by-side through the trees and I am careful where I step and lift my feet high over the tree trunks and branches and things that get in my way. I lift Sooty up and whisper in his ear. ‘Do you like it, Sooty?’

  He squeals and I know he loves me as much as I love him. I decide now that I am having the time of my life. That’s what Mummy says when she’s having a really, really great time. I decide that if Mummy has even a little bit as much of a good time as I’m having when we’re with her family, she’ll be having the time of her life,
too.

  JOSEPHINE

  10TH MAY 1983

  I know something terrible has happened when I see Mammy’s handwriting on the envelope on the mat inside the front door. It’s the first letter she’s written to me and I know her writing straight away; it’s scrawly and the letters are all different sizes as if they belong to a child. I tear it open and am skimming the lines when the life is ripped right out of me and I slide to the floor and the pins of the doormat prick my skin. I fade in and out, my body heavy and hot and stuck to the bristles of the mat, the tears flowing from my face and down my nose.

  She doesn’t write to me for God knows how long, and then she writes to tell me that Granny is dead and it was three days until she was found and that the funeral will be in two. I want to run down the front steps of the house and all the way to the airport and get the first flight over. When the darkness with shooting stars has gone from behind my eyes, I sit against the wall and look at the stamp date; it was sent over a week ago, so the funeral will already have been held. Nausea comes in a tidal wave to drown me and I’m suffocating.

  Michael comes running down the stairs, shouting, ‘What’s wrong, what’s wrong?’

  In a voice that isn’t my own, I whisper, ‘It’s too late. Too late.’ I’m tingling all over. Michael is shaking me but I can’t see him.

  ‘Josephine! Josephine!’ he shouts, and it all sounds so serious, and I think, It is serious.

  Then there’s Joyce’s voice calling from the top of the stairs: ‘What in God’s name is happening?’ and Michael telling her to go for water.

  ‘She’s dead, Michael. Granny’s dead. We’re too late. We didn’t make it. Just a couple of months…’ I say it all with my eyes closed because I can’t see, and I lay my head on the dirty floor because the world is rocking around me. ‘She was three days dead before they found her, and the funeral’s gone. It’s too late.’

  He rubs cold water over my face and it seeps into my blouse, and all I can feel is the trickle down my back and my teeth knocking off each other as if I was freezing cold. He carries me up the stairs and, if it was any other moment, I would think it was so romantic, like something out of a movie; but my arms hang limp and my jaw hurts and I’m rambling. It doesn’t feel romantic. It feels like a piece of me has been cut off and is bleeding all the way up the stairs.

  Michael lays me on the bed and the letter falls out of my hand. Someone puts a glass to my lips and whiskey soaks my tongue. I retch to be sick.

  When the heaving is over, I say, ‘We should’ve gone, Michael. We shouldn’t have waited.’

  ‘Shush,’ they say, rubbing my face, which only makes me worse.

  I turn my back on them and curl my legs up to my chest. It comes to me that I was on my way to my new job. ‘I’ve got to go to work,’ I start, ‘I’ve got to…’ I go to get up, but they push me back and say to lie down and not worry about that.

  I close my eyes and drift off up the path to Granny’s house, where the nets are clean and she’s waving to me through the window. We’re sitting at the kitchen table. I’m telling her a story about Bernadette getting a stick across the knuckles for talking back at school, and then she gives me a boiled sweet to give to Bernadette the next day when I see her. She has her back to me, but tells me she’s still listening while she spreads hard butter over a slice of toasted soda bread. I am sitting on the small chair on the other side of the fire, getting hot from the blaze. My face burns just the way it did on those evenings, but now it’s with fever. My eyes hurt and the sockets behind them feel like thumping, gaping holes.

  Granny, I have someone for you to meet. His name is Michael and we’re getting married. I have the polka-dot chiffon scarf I promised her; that’ll have them all jealous when she wears it to Mass on Sunday, and she is squealing with delight.

  Granny, Granny, I whisper in her ear. She’s in bed lying on her back like a corpse, and I move her silver wisps of hair to the side and whisper again, Granny. She wakes up with a fright and says I scared the living bejesus out of her, and what time is it at all? It’s the middle of the night and I have found my way to her house in the blue-black dark, in my nightie and shoes, because I know the road and its curves and the pebbled opening where you take the fork up the path to her house. I ask her if I can move in with her for ever, and she says, What on earth has come over you? And she lifts up the covers and I climb into the warmth and cuddle her all night.

  The next morning she asks me what’s wrong, but, in the light of day, what can I say to her? How can I say such abominable things to my granny, who is the only one who loves me?

  We walk back to the house in silence. When she leaves, I get the belt across the back of my legs and am told if I do such a thing again I will be marched straight to the asylum for bold girls like myself. Just one wrong step. One step and they’ll have me locked up.

  Granny, Granny, I whisper in her ear, and this time she is lying on the kitchen floor, face-down, blood running from her nose from the impact of the fall. The fire has gone out and her skin is waspish as a wire sponge. I carry her to the chair and light the fire with paper and a small square of carbon and throw in two sods of turf from the bucket, and I sit on the arm of the chair, putting my hand through her hair because touching her skin is like rubbing yourself against sand. I massage her cardigan over her chest to get her heart going again.

  ‘How are you, Josephine?’

  The voice breaks me in two, but no one sees because my shell of skin holds me together. I let go of my pendant and look up. It’s Mister Cohen, looking at me with concerned eyes. I wonder if he is worried about me, or about the sad sight I must be, moping about in front of the customers. He puts his arms round me and my chest is pressed up against his, and I feel sick at the thought of him making the most of the opportunity. I would push him away but I can’t muster up the courage.

  He says he can see I am not well and I should go home, but I tell him I need the money.

  He tells me not to worry about anything, that it’ll all be okay.

  Riddled with guilt for doubting him, I get my things and promise to be back tomorrow.

  I visit Father Francis and give him an envelope with money in it, so Granny will be remembered in Mass for the next week, and I stay to help arrange the flowers for the altar. Someone told me once that cut flowers are already dead, so each stem I cut at a diagonal, smelling its sweet pollen smell, is a reminder that Granny is gone.

  None of it matters, any more. There’s no need to put on a show and force myself to smile when they kiss Michael and shake his hand and congratulate him. I picture Daddy patting him on the back and asking what he’ll have to drink, and my skin crawls with maggots that aren’t there.

  ‘We won’t be going home,’ I tell him when he picks me up from work on Saturday. He picks me up now whenever he can, and I know he has spoken to the girls to keep an eye on me.

  ‘Oh, come on. You’ll regret it if you don’t.’ He has his arm round me and he taps me with his hand, as if that will make everything better.

  ‘I won’t.’

  He stops and turns towards me. When I don’t turn, he takes my shoulders in his hands and makes me face him. ‘Josephine, we’ve got to go – we’ve already got the tickets.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Michael. You go to visit your family and get a ticket to come home. That way, at least you’ll use one of the tickets.’

  ‘But we were going to meet each other’s family. That was the plan.’

  ‘I can’t do it now, Michael,’ I say. ‘I just can’t. Maybe next year.’ I know he is disappointed, and that this trip meant a lot to him. But he must see the look on my face because he puts his arms round me and rubs my hair with the palms of his hands.

  ‘It’s all right, it doesn’t matter,’ he whispers in my ear. ‘Everything will be okay, you’ll see.’ He kisses me on the cheek, softly, in fear of hurting me, the way you do when someone is sick.

  When I get home I write a letter explaining that things have changed
and I can’t get away from work. I enclose money for them to put towards the funeral.

  Michael starts looking for a house and in a matter of weeks has put in an offer and it’s accepted.

  It’s just what I need to bring me up again. Between the new accounts job in the mornings and the café in the afternoons, and now a house, I am kept occupied and my mind is busy. I put what energy I have left into throwing a party. I follow recipes in cookbooks to make canapés with cheese and pear and walnuts, and ham and roasted cherry tomatoes. I am the woman who can do it all.

  When that’s over, I am busy packing up all my things to move into the house. He borrows a van and the girls help us carry down the boxes. Joyce and Maura can’t believe I’m moving in with Michael without getting married first, but what does it matter? Michael is a progressive sort of fellow, he doesn’t believe in all of those rules that box us in, and I was never a pure woman, anyway.

  For our first Friday evening in our new home I have bought a bottle of expensive red wine and a bottle of sparkling. I’ve set the table and lit candles and am preparing minted lamb with Dauphinoise potatoes and roasted carrots. I’m standing at the kitchen counter chopping the fresh mint when Michael comes in, smelling of shampoo and with his hair flopping around his face. He puts his arms round my waist and kisses me on the neck.

  ‘I could stay like this for ever,’ I tell him.

  ‘Really?’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Truly.’

  ‘You could stay like this for ever?’ Sometimes he teases me and I call him a tinker and tell him to leave me alone, but I love it.

  ‘I could.’ I turn and look him in the eyes and he knows I mean it.

  ‘So could I, my darling.’ He takes my hands and lifts my arm over my head, twirling me round, and we have a dance, just the two of us, on the kitchen floor.