by Doreen Finn
I leaned my back against the apple tree. The sky blistered with heat, cloudless and a blue so pale it was almost white. The grass underfoot was yellow. I felt sorry for it, so faded and tired-looking. I wanted to drench it with the hose, just once, though I knew Sarah would refuse. Not for any reason could we waste water. But Gemma was on my side; she said we could do it next time Sarah went out, as this withholding wasn’t fair on the grass.
Judith told us that it was almost bright before Chris got to bed. ‘He needs so little sleep, just four or five hours and he’s set. Not like me!’
‘And what does he get up to? There’s nothing to do, surely?’ Sarah was a firm believer in early nights and equally early mornings. No time to waste lounging around in bed.
Judith shrugged one shoulder. ‘Who knows? Nothing, I’m sure. Probably work, preparing lectures, that sort of thing. He says it frees up his daytime hours.’ She said it as though all men sat around their gardens at night, as though all men spent hours night swimming alone while their families slept.
Except Chris hadn’t been alone the previous night. He hadn’t been sitting, planning his summer lectures and thinking about work. Chris had been pouring wine into my mother’s glass. Chris had been drawing her out of herself, asking her questions no one ever asked, persuading her to stay a little longer, to elongate the time they had without their attention being claimed by their families.
‘Gemma seemed to enjoy herself,’ Judith said. She wiped drops off her glass, rubbed her fingers on her apron.
‘She had a great time,’ Sarah nodded. ‘It was good for her to get out. Away from the painting!’ She said that as though it were a joke, as though Gemma deliberately avoided social contact in order to keep painting. If Sarah had her way, Gemma would go out a lot more, meet more people. Meet a husband.
‘I think Brad was quite taken with her.’
‘Which one was Brad?’
I remembered Brad. The bearded man whose expression had changed ever so slightly when I said Gemma was my mother.
‘He’s quite the ladies’ man!’ Judith laughed. ‘I don’t know how Holly puts up with him.’
Sarah’s humour seemed to fade a little. ‘Well, he should just behave himself. There’s no excuse for that sort of carry-on.’
Judith refilled our glasses. ‘Oh, you know these academics.’
Sarah watched her closely. ‘No, I don’t, actually. Know what?’
Judith rattled the ice in her glass. ‘They’re not like other men, the ones who go to work in a suit and spend their days in an office. They’re …’ She searched for a word. ‘Freer. They’re freer than most. All that time spent in their own heads.’ She laughed again. ‘It gives them notions.’
Sarah placed her empty glass on the tray. ‘Well, I know what I’d give them if they tried any of their notions on me.’
Judith put her hand on Sarah’s arm. ‘They wouldn’t dare.’ And they both laughed, my grandmother and this American woman. They laughed and then they laughed some more.
Sarah wiped her eyes. ‘Bloody right they wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t get far with me.’
I thought about Brad being taken with Gemma, but I knew Judith wasn’t being quite honest. It wasn’t Brad who had watched her, or refilled her glass, played the music she liked. It had been Chris. Chris had made sure Gemma had enough to eat, had moved into the seat near her, had asked her what records he should put on the turntable. Judith had found countless ways to distract her husband, and it wasn’t because Brad Zimmer, with his beard and his wife, Holly, was entranced by my mother. Judith didn’t want Chris near Gemma, but she could never say that because it was only a hunch. The same way I had a hunch.
Something wasn’t quite right.
12
My mother was sitting at her dressing table, trying on lipstick. The late morning light worked its way through the half-open shutters, burnishing the bedroom, illuminating Gemma’s skin. Gemma was beautiful in a way that didn’t need enhancing with cosmetics. Her face just worked. She smacked her lips together, blotted them on a tissue and then applied more. Some sort of dark red, it made her mouth look huge, bruised. She lifted her brush and dragged it through her dark mass of hair over and over. On the little table beside her bed, the radio played. The DJ announced three in a row by John Lennon. Gemma and I loved John Lennon. His songs moved me in a way that I couldn’t explain at the time. My mother was a real fan, even when he was shouting about his mother and I found it difficult to understand him.
‘You won’t ever scream like that about me, will you?’
Gemma had cupped my cheek when she asked me that one day, while she painted and I sat on the overstuffed armchair, reading. Not fully comprehending her question, I had shaken my head. Why would I scream about her? She had then lifted the needle on the record player and let it drop softly onto another, happier song. Sometimes music made me sad and my mother knew this and anticipated it.
This wasn’t like Gemma, examining her face. Painting was her thing, what consumed her fully. Gemma was happiest when she was in her attic, working on her pictures. She also loved reading, and her books dotted the house. Here in her room she had piles of books, most of them creased and thumbed to fragility. She read novels, usually in translation from Russian or Spanish – dark, heavy stories of oppression and denial. She loved poetry too, and kept volumes on the small table beside her bed. Poetry helped Gemma sleep at night. Lorca, Bécquer, Borges. Clara Janés, when only a woman’s poems would suffice. Bishop, Plath. Yeats, when she needed something Irish to think about, and some Heaney and Kavanagh when Yeats was too much. Gemma read in cycles, phases. Inexplicable to all but us. Poetry informed my mother’s art, she told me once. All art is related, part of one big movement of the soul. It didn’t matter how you expressed your art. You could be a painter, a writer, a photographer, a sculptor. You could write poetry or music. You could see the world in a hundred different ways, and create something out of a piece of stone or nothing more tangible than your thought. There was no right or wrong, Gemma said. Everything was relative. The only real truth in the world was art.
My mother had changed out of her painting shirt. The top she wore was pale green with narrow straps over her shoulders. Her skin was turning brown. She wore a skirt she’d made a couple of months before, all bright colours bleeding into each other. It looked like all her paint tubes had exploded on the material. It was long and diaphanous, and trailed on the air when she moved.
She caught me watching her. Turning to me, she smiled, held out her hand. ‘What’s going on?’
I squashed in beside her on the rectangular seat. ‘Nothing.’ I touched a blue glass bottle. ‘What’s this?’
Gemma picked it up, removed the glass stopper. ‘Perfume.’
‘Is it new?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I’ve had it for ages but I don’t wear it. I prefer the other one.’
Somehow, I doubted she was telling me the truth. I had definitely never seen the blue glass bottle before. ‘Can I have some?’
She tipped it against her fingers, dabbed them to my neck. The scent was new, different to the fragrance she habitually wore. It smelled of midnight, of whispery taffeta, of navy velvet. I imagined a man in a dark suit, elbow crooked, his arm offered to a woman.
‘I prefer the other one.’
‘The green tea? So do I. This is just for a change.’
But I don’t want you to change, I thought. I like the way you smell, even when you don’t wear perfume. I like you without red lips and I like you in your painting shirts.
‘Are you going out?’
‘No.’ My mother picked up a mascara wand and began to blacken her eyelashes.
‘Why are you doing this, then?’
She kept her eyes on her reflection as she blinked her lashes against the sticky black wand. ‘I’m not doing anything, Megan. It’s just nice to look nice sometimes.’
‘You always look nice.’
Her laugh was unexpected. She
nudged me.
‘What?’ I asked.
She shook her head again, screwed the lid back on the mascara again. ‘Nothing. You’re just funny, that’s all.’ She put her arm around me, dropped a kiss on my forehead. ‘Don’t change, Megan, do you hear me? Make sure you’re always this sweet.’
I rested my head on my mother’s shoulder, trailed my fingers over the tanned skin on her arms. ‘Do you like Beth?’
Gemma picked up her brush again and ran it through her hair. Her nails were a dark red, the polish shiny and new. ‘She seems nice. A bit sulky, I think.’ She divided her hair in three and rapidly plaited the strands together. Her fingers worked the sections into a braid, snapped an elastic around the ends and flicked it over her shoulder. I lifted it and let it fall. My mother’s hair entranced me.
I twisted the lid off a bottle of cleanser, poured some of it into my palm. ‘What about Judith?’
Gemma made a face in the mirror. ‘I don’t know. She seems nice.’
‘Beth says that sometimes she drinks a bottle of wine by herself.’
My mother laughed. ‘Good for her!’
‘Judith is fifty.’ I liked having information to pass on to Gemma. It made me feel important, her equal.
‘Fifty? No way!’
We were both laughing now. ‘Beth told me.’
‘Well, well, well. She doesn’t look it.’
‘And Chris?’
I busied myself with a tissue, wiped my hands clean of lotion. I knew that if I looked my mother in the eye as I asked her that, she’d know I had seen her night swimming with Chris. She would know I had observed how he was when she was around: quiet, watchful, a jungle animal ready to pounce. I wanted her to know that I had seen them night swimming, but I couldn’t ever say it, so I thought that maybe if I hinted at what I knew, Gemma would understand.
A pause, a slight intake of breath. Then her voice, as normal. ‘He seems nice.’
‘He’s nice to you.’
Gemma occupied herself with putting her small collection of cosmetics back in the zipped pouch she kept them in. ‘Do you think so?’
I shrugged. ‘I suppose.’ He was nice to her. Even Gemma had to see that. ‘Will you do my nails?’
Gemma held her hands out in front of her, fingers splayed. ‘Maybe later.’
‘No, do them now.’
I fanned my hands on the dressing table. My mother painted the varnish on in short, careful strokes. When she was finished, she screwed the lid back on and put it away. She returned the perfume bottle to the dresser drawer. Perfume should always be stored in a dark, cool place, she told me once. That way, it lasts.
‘Let me see,’ she said. I held my hands up for her to inspect. ‘Perfect. Now let me do your hair and then you can go back downstairs. I have to finish something this afternoon.’
Gemma gathered my hair into a bun and stuck hairpins in it to keep it from falling out. The pins dug into my scalp, but I didn’t want to hurt Gemma’s feelings, so I said nothing. She turned me around to face her when she was finished.
‘Lovely,’ she declared.
I smiled.
Gemma stroked her thumbs across my cheeks. Our faces were so close that I could see the tiny amber flecks that stippled her green irises. Our identical eyes. ‘They wanted me to give you away, you know that. But I didn’t tell you that they said that, if I kept you, I should pretend that you were my sister, that Sarah was your real mother.’ She shook her head. ‘As though that would’ve worked, with my father dead.’
They were the nurses at the hospital where I was born, the woman from social services who visited us in the days after Gemma and I came home, the priest whom Gemma told to leave the house and never return. And probably others. People had a lot of opinions in those days, especially when it came to mothers without husbands.
‘Why?’
Gemma stood and moved to the window. She pushed the sash until it opened. Warm air made the voile flutter. She sat on the sill, her arms folded. ‘I don’t know. To make it all seem acceptable, I suppose.’ All the fun and lightness had left her, as though only minutes before we hadn’t been painting our nails or putting on perfume. I didn’t know how to put her mood right again. So I didn’t try. I just listened to her. ‘It didn’t seem to matter how I felt about anything, or how you would be affected. It was all about making it all right for everyone else. Keeping the shame away. That sort of thing. They didn’t even know me, but already they were planning out my life for me.’ She bit her lower lip and shivered, as though it were winter. Then she waved her hand, stood up. ‘Sorry, Megan. I don’t know why I said any of that. It’s not important any more.’
I didn’t move from my position on the rectangular seat. I hated that my birth had made my mother’s life so difficult, my grandmother’s life so difficult. It wasn’t my fault, I was often told, but always, over everything, there was this pervasive sense that somehow I was to blame for it all.
Sarah would have gone mad if she’d known that Gemma was talking to me like this. There was no point in rehashing everything, she liked to say. No point in dragging the past around with us. Let it go. Move on. Be in the present and look to the future. That’s what Sarah did, and it worked. She didn’t get angry or upset if people asked about Gemma and me, didn’t worry about what others thought.
But Gemma did allow others to get to her, spent too much time locked away in her attic. Brooding, Sarah called it. Nothing good came of brooding. It was the same with the news. We didn’t need to hear about Northern Ireland. We didn’t need to hear about apartheid. Anything that diminished our lives in any way was not welcome. Hence, we didn’t go to church. It was out there, all around me, around all of us, but here in this house life was for living and for being happy.
My mother moved towards me. She put her arms around me, laid her cheek against the top of my head. ‘My little angel,’ she whispered into my hair. ‘You’re my sweetest angel.’ And I knew that, whatever had gone before, whatever decisions my mother did or didn’t make, keeping me had been the right thing to do, for both of us. I tightened my arms around her, breathed in her scent. Green tea, coriander, lavender soap. Her new perfume an extra layer, different, unknowable. Her hair tickled my face. Outside, the heat continued unabated.
On the wall behind us, Gemma had framed a quote from Jorge Luis Borges, the writer she so admired. So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. Gemma had written the words in black ink and painted over them in washed-out watercolours. It was difficult to fully understand what Borges meant, but Gemma said he was a genius and I accepted that. She was right about most things.
I’m sure that Felipe had admired Borges too, possibly had even introduced my mother to his work.
Gemma was doing just fine when it came to planting her own garden.
13
My knees were sore from kneeling but there wasn’t enough room to stand up or stretch. Daniel fiddled with the lid on the huge Mason jar his mother had given him, oblivious to the cramped conditions of his hideout. Inside the jar, a ladybird tripped over a branch Daniel had dropped in earlier, along with a handful of withered grass and a blossom from the bougainvillea. The blossom curled at the edges, dark cerise with a white centre, and the ladybird ignored it. I angled my book to catch slants of light that slipped through cracks in the makeshift wall. Daniel made notes in his insect book, his neat handwriting sloping across the lines. My pencils lay in a neat row on the ground, my sketchpad open on a new page. Daniel liked me to draw pictures of his insects. He dated them, named them and stuck them in a scrapbook he kept with details of all the creatures he had captured. He said that he would write a book all about them when he was older.
We had built the hideout during the Easter holidays the previous year, after reading a book about a group of children who had one and used it as their crime-solving headquarters. Solving mysteries was something we were briefly interested in, but once our own HQ had been built, we
sort of lost interest in being crime busters. Daniel’s mother had let us use a corner of the end of their garden as our site, and we had collected various materials: bits of wood, some bricks, plastic and a sheet of corrugated metal that someone had abandoned in the lane behind the gardens. We dragged it through the door in the wall and wedged it in place as a roof. When it rained, the sound was like thunder right over our heads, ricocheting around the compressed darkness inside.
I hadn’t been there since the previous summer, and until I’d ducked under the temporary roof, I hadn’t realised how much I had grown, how much we both had. Mostly, Daniel used it to store his insect jars or to shelter injured birds. Once, a fox cub, lame and abandoned, had found its way into the garden and Daniel had carried it to the hideout, laid it on an old towel and fed it leftovers, bits of chicken, beef, bacon rinds. We never knew what became of the cub. After a week of careful minding, it disappeared. Sarah said it had got strong enough to leave, but Stevie had sneered and said dogs had got it in the night. Sarah had said not to pay any attention to Stevie, so we didn’t.
That day the air inside the hideout stagnated, heavy with dust. Spiders’ webs made our hands sticky, and the dry ground was as hard as cement. I shifted, pins and needles beginning to numb my legs. Dusty earth stuck to my skin and I brushed it off.
‘Careful!’ Daniel put his hand out. ‘No sudden movements.’
‘It’s only a ladybird,’ I admonished. ‘She doesn’t care what we do.’
‘Ladybirds are very sensitive.’ He stroked the outside of the jar with his finger.
We lapsed into our own activities. Pages flicked. Pencils rasped.
Eventually Daniel broke the silence. ‘Stevie went out last night. After we were all in bed. I heard him.’
This caught my attention. ‘Where did he go?’
‘No idea. But he took his bike.’
I wondered if Beth had been with him. She was very interested in being around Stevie. She found him much more amusing and interesting than I ever had. Since the Americans’ arrival, Stevie was suddenly around a lot more, visible, irritating.