When he was little, Tim would put his hands to his ears to shut out their rows; his mother’s shrill defiance, his father’s querulous misapprehensions. Later, he used headphones. Heavy metal was the best.
Mum opens the oven door. The hinges protest.
‘Ah, Frank, can you really see it?’ his mother says, all tempered reason. ‘Our Tim!’
Our Tim. He can’t work out her tone.
His father harrumphs.
‘Anyway, if it doesn’t work out, sure doesn’t he have the business to fall back on?’
‘Oh yes, good old dependable Frank, always good to fall back on.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ he hears Mum say.
There is silence then. Is that a prelude to agreement? Tim wonders. His mother makes some move. Tim imagines her stroking his father’s temple with a floury hand.
‘Do it for me,’ Mum wheedles, ‘for my sake.’
Tim can hear her desperation now; not for him but for herself and for fear of the memory he holds of the Man with the Quiet Voice whose name cannot be spoken. His father is silent; somehow, she has bought his acquiescence.
‘Reggie?’
‘Tim,’ she says.
Oh relief. Thank God! He imagines her corpse reassembling itself into just-woken Reggie, like a roll of film rewound. As if his call has brought her back from the dead. There is a sound in the background. Like the movement of sheets, like a companion disengaging. His heart tightens. Dread giving way to something meaner and entirely more personal. Gone now the images of carnage, the blood-spattered pavement, the public catastrophe.
‘Are you alright?’
‘Yeah …’ she says uncertainly. He imagines her blurred by sleep, hair comically askew leaning on a plump elbow. Post-coital.
‘I just saw it on the TV, the bomb.’
‘Bomb – what bomb?’
‘You didn’t hear it? Nightclub – petrol bomb, they think.’
‘I was fast asleep. What time is it?’ She is waking now, coming into focus.
‘I was worried – I thought you might have been caught up in it.’
She rises, he can hear her. He imagines her, mobile in hand, with the sheets draped around her stumbling towards the window, parting the nets and looking out on to a Parisian street, narrow, cobbled, slimed with rain. He hears her opening a window. He imagines her sticking her blowsy head and goose-pimpled shoulders out over the sill.
‘Ugh, wet!’
A siren wails.
‘What’s that?’ he asks as he hears the latch closing.
‘Nothing,’ she says.
‘There’s someone else there, isn’t there?’
‘Oh, Tim, don’t start …’
An ambulance, Tim guesses, listening to the Doppler effect, the off-tune coming and going of it. Maybe one he has seen earlier on the TV? Maybe on its way back from the scene? The immediacy of connection startles him – images he has just seen translated to a bowl of sound at his ear.
Dah, dee-da-da-dah, dee-da-da-dah, Dah, dee-da-da-dah, dee-da-da-dah.
Each city had its own tonic sol-fa and Tim recognised them all. He’d never told Reggie; it seemed too anoraky even for him, or maybe it was something he was keeping in reserve. For a moment just like this …
Dah, dee-da-da-dah, dee-da-da-dah …
That wasn’t Paris, that was Rome.
‘You’re lying, Reggie,’ he says simply.
There is silence at the other end of the phone.
‘How do you know?’ Her voice has lost its penny-bright insistence.
Pooof! All over.
Like someone letting the air out of a balloon.
You’d had to walk all the way home, your feet hurting in the new sandals. You’d reached the Green when you heard the first explosion. All you remember is the funny smell, a strange silence as Mum halts and listens as if to some soft aftershock. Then the banshee wails begin as fire engines pass blaring importantly, ambulances cluck and pock. It is a symphony of distress as if the world has been agitated by your private tempest. That day of all days, no one takes any notice of a pregnant woman streeling along the street weeping silently and a boy still smarting with hurt, holding on to his fury by a string and blaming the Man with the Quiet Voice for all of it. Dad is frantic. Jesus, Ro, where have you been, I’ve rung every hospital in the city. Haven’t you heard? Three bombs, all at the same time, I was out of my mind with worry. In your condition! He catches you by the lapels and examines you like the doctor in a temper. He pauses at your reddened cheek. What were you doing in town, anyway? Shoes, Mum says dully. You often think of him afterwards, Denis, imagine him blundering down Nassau Street straight into the fiery red maw of it …
He goes to his parents’ for Sunday lunch, roast beef with all the trimmings. Something else Reggie sneered at. Tied to your parents’ apron strings, she would say. But she was at an age where she was still rebelling against hers; he has gone beyond that. Age has chastened his mother or is it the longevity of her deception? His father has mellowed, too; a bad hip has softened his cough. His sister Maeve – conceived on that holiday in Majorca, Tim suspects, which his mother bashfully referred to afterwards as their second honeymoon – has taken over the family business, rebranding Dad’s scrap metal as architectural salvage.
‘Where’s Reggie?’ Mum asks as she clatters round the kitchen tidying up after lunch.
‘In Paris,’ he says.
No, he corrects himself silently, Rome. In Rome with bloody Marco.
‘How do you keep up with her?’ Mum says as she scrapes the gravied remains of the plates into the bin. ‘All that gadding about! Wasn’t like that in our day. You put up and shut up.’
This is for his father’s benefit, like much of what she says these days.
Over coffee, they fall into musing about the past. His parents often retreat into reminiscence now. For Reggie’s amusement they retold all of Tim’s baby stories. But they don’t need an audience.
‘Remember when Tim said his first word?’ his father starts.
‘He was slow to talk,’ Mum chips in with that old reflex of contradiction.
‘I was absolutely convinced you’d said Daddy,’ his father goes on. ‘I heard you say it. Clear as a bell. But would your mother believe me? And would you say it again? On demand?’
‘Curse of the firstborn. Poor Tim wasn’t allowed childish babble,’ Mum says ruefully. ‘Every sound had to have a meaning.’
Tim enjoys these archival squabbles. It gives his parents a chance to be softer with one another, which they weren’t in the original versions of these stories. And he hasn’t the heart to correct them. His first word was not for either of them. Even then it was the song of the sirens he heard.
CHINESE BURNS
The seductive power of the bruise, once discovered, cannot be unlearned. She had been trying to stem the fidgeting, that was all. Her mother’s fingers worked constantly at the seamed hem of the turned-down sheet as if she were trying to undo it, stitch by stitch. Norah had been sitting by the bedside doing the crossword, speaking the clues aloud. In compensation, she supposed.
‘Seven Across: Discomfort one gets in the face, four letters, third letter i.’
It was something her mother used to do when she was in her health, roping Norah and her sister Trish in, often unwillingly, to finish it off. Norah has persisted with the ritual despite the fact that her mother can hardly be said to be participating any more. These days her mother is sequestered in a self-imposed silence. The loss of I, Dr Somers calls it. Though, occasionally, an answer will come from the dim, clouded caverns of her mother’s brain. Pain.
Norah had got annoyed at the frenetic scrabbling of fingers on counterpane. Simply that. It was a sudden flare of anger, a pinkening rage, and, reaching out, she pressed down on the soft fleshy underbelly of her mother’s arm. (There are still, surprisingly, seemingly untouched parts of her mother’s anatomy that are youthful almost.) It was an admonitory gesture, not a slap, not anything even remotel
y rough. It was pressure, gentle pressure. Just to make her stop. But even to herself, Norah’s justifications sound courtroom false.
By the time she’d got as far as Twenty Across – Scorn to see girl’s father at home – there was a bruise. A blue blush on the skin, just above the veiny tributaries of her mother’s wrist. It is the only quickening impulse in her mother’s pathology, this seeming rush to ruin. It reminds Norah of the fast-forward sequences in TV nature programmes showing pert blooms turning to slatternly rot in the crisp blink of a camera shutter.Disdain.
By morning, as if in affront, the bruise has turned livid, blood-angry. She fully expects Tena to confront her about it. Tena is one of the ‘new Irish’, or a ‘non-national,’ depending on the terminology you favour. The latter, Norah thought, made her sound like a minus quantity, as if by coming to Ireland she had lost all rights not just to her original identity but to any identity at all. Tena is still in her twenties, younger than Norah by at least a decade, yet Norah, who is her boss, is slightly afraid of her. When she looks at her she sees in Tena’s clear eyes the shrewd appraisal of someone much older. A grandmother peers out, the grandmother Tena often speaks of, who raised her. A woman who couldn’t read or write, who’d learned to sign her name by practising in six-year-old Tena’s lined copybook. Now Tena with her impeccable unaccented English, her pragmatic efficiency, is a world away from her grandmother’s life of pickling and thrift. But it is her native skills of care-giving rather than her arts degree with business communication that she is using in Norah’s employ. She brings to the work something both alert and demanding.
At the interview, Tena had insisted on showing Norah exactly where she came from on the globe that sat on the bookshelves in the good room. Zadar, Croatia. A walled city, she explained, pointing to the Dalmatian coast. She’d mentioned Roman ruins as if a familiarity with the antique was a prerequisite for the job. Provenance, it seemed, mattered. When Norah was showing her out that first day, Tena looked around the hall curiously.
‘And this is where you grew up?’
Norah nodded and pulled a self-deprecating face. Tena ran her blunt, capable fingers appraisingly along the high sheen of the half-moon table. For a moment Norah thought she was trying to put a price on it.
‘Aren’t you lucky!’ she had said with neither envy nor rancour.
It is not how Norah feels. She is thirty-seven, divorced, living with her ailing mother in her childhood home on Prosperity Drive.
Explain this! Norah imagines Tena’s sharp interrogative, as she lifts her mother’s bony hand up for inspection. But even after three days, when the bruise is a sullen nacreous yellow, Tena seems not to have noticed it. Norah feels relieved but also vaguely dissatisfied. If Tena has missed this, what else is she missing?
Norah contemplates calling her sister. She doesn’t know why; Trish, away for years, is not the person she would naturally confide in. The distance militates against it. Trish is in Italy so could know nothing of the local conditions that have produced her mother’s bruise. How could Norah explain to Trish the creeping sense of victory she feels because her crime has remained undiscovered? And if Norah did ring her, Trish would only ask those horribly concrete questions she has always asked. How does Mum feel, inside, I mean? Is she dead already, do you think? Does she know what’s going on? Trish had always wanted answers from Norah whereas with their mother she had wanted love untainted by fact or history. And yet, just now, it is Trish Norah wants to talk to.
There has always been a gap between the sisters; five years, and now a couple of thousand miles. Norah used to believe the reason was Patrick, their almost-brother. She remembered the pregnancy, her mother growing menacingly big, the globe of her belly hardening while she became softer, abstracted. Norah was too young to realise that this sturdy cargo might turn into a rival. She’d never even thought of it as a baby-to-be, just a burden her mother had to get her arms around. Which is how it turned out. Patrick was stillborn. Because Norah had been a witness to her mother returning from the hospital with neither burden nor heralded baby, it had to be explained to her. Daddy, weeping, said the child had gone to heaven, that Mam had had a little angel whom God had called home. (It was the first time Norah had seen her father cry, though not the last; when he was ill towards the end, his eyes would fill every time he looked at her.) Norah was worried Patrick might be in limbo. No, no, her mother had insisted, Patrick had been baptised in the hospital so there was nothing to worry about. But Patrick lived in a domestic limbo, belonging to the golden time before Trish. Just one more thing she was excluded from. Until Norah broke the silence.
How the argument with Trish had started Norah couldn’t remember, but once ignited it followed the same trajectory so that it was always the same argument, essentially. It was late at night close to Christmas and Norah had come in from a party.
‘Well … ?’ Trish demanded when Norah threw herself on the sofa and kicked off her shoes; they were pinching her. Trish, fourteen and extravagantly bored, got up and turned the sound down on the TV. Their mother was on night shift at the telephone exchange.
‘Well what?’
‘How did it go?’
The party had been a washout. The boss had asked her up to dance and she’d made a fool of herself. Mr Grove, years older than her, had always made her feel uncomfortable. He had a lascivious manner, a viperish laugh. In his company, Norah felt lumpish and raw as if the joke was always on her. And yet, and yet when he took her in his arms, she had felt a swell of helpless weakness. Not like a swoon, it couldn’t have been that, she argued with herself. No, it was a strange tenderness that overcame her but seemed to emanate from him. It was unaccountable. This was Hugh Grove! (Huge Rove, the girls in the office called him on account of his wandering eye.) It had made her cry. She’d wept on his shoulder during a slow set.
‘Oh, Trish,’ she said, ‘it was the office party. What do you think happened?’
‘I dunno,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Did you get off with anyone?’
Trish purported to have a jaded and mechanistic view of romance.
‘As if I’m going to tell you that.’ Norah remembered her embarrassed exit from the dance floor, escorted by her friend Dan, who’d intervened as Mr Grove stood, hands hanging, staring after her and everyone smirking, thinking he’d tried to feel her up.
‘You never tell me anything,’ Trish said.
Norah knew this trope by heart: her shortcomings as an elder sister. After their father had died, Trish had often pestered her about him – what was he like, what did his voice sound like, why did he die? – impossible questions that irritated Norah as if she were the repository of all grown-up information.
‘Ah, go on,’ Trish had said, ‘tell me.’ She was standing in front of the TV, a hectic car chase playing out silently behind her.
‘Tell you what?’
‘Anything … you’re the one who acts like you know everything. Miss Know-all!’
Something about Trish’s tone, the peeved assertion of both Norah’s superior knowledge and her withholding, rankled. Some hot little bubble of anger popped and it was out before she could stop herself.
‘Okay, okay, here’s something you don’t know. We had a brother.’
‘What?’
‘Before you were born,’ Norah said.
‘And why did nobody tell me?’ Trish said, grabbing Norah by the wrist. For a minute she thought Trish was going to give her a Chinese burn. In their childhood tussles, it was Trish’s trademark torture; she would manacle Norah and screw the skin into a handcuff of pain. Even if she had, Norah couldn’t have answered. She didn’t know how Patrick had come to be hidden in the first place. Her mother and she had never spoken of it, not even to decide that Trish shouldn’t be told. But once it was said, Norah felt a sickening turnover of betrayal – as if she’d exhumed some grubby secret of her mother’s – and a lurch of shame that was all hers.
‘Is that why I’m called Patricia – to make up for him?’
>
That had never struck Norah before and she shook her head but Trish was disbelieving.
‘You and Mum,’ she said, letting Norah go and pushing her away, ‘you and your secrets.’
Norah potters around the kitchen cleaning the grill and watching a bad soap on the little portable TV she bought when she moved back home. She picks up the crossword where she left off. Working her way methodically through the black-and-white grid on her own, Norah sees the neat satisfaction of filling in all those blanks. Certain things remained cryptic, of course. Like what had made things between her and her mother so difficult. Not just now; always. Her father’s death had bound them, but in a covert way. It had forced them to become a team, joined them in the freemasonry of grief. Norah was eleven, old enough to understand, her mother decreed, thus granting her pre-eminence. She had taken Norah into the dim cramped space under the stairs to break the news. (Well, it was the place of punishment in the house, where she and Trish were sent when they misbehaved.) Her mother said they wouldn’t be disturbed in there, meaning by Trish. She, being only six, had to be spared, but Norah was privy – that was the word.
‘You know the way your daddy’s been sick?’ her mother began. She was sitting on an upturned orange box (where Norah, the punished child, usually sat). The highest point of the space under the stairs was piled with cardboard boxes of old and broken things. Norah was able to stand upright but only just and the sloping ceiling with its peeling timber boards made her want to duck. Her mother had not turned on the light – a naked bulb over the door – but she had left the door open a crack, letting in the sickened light of the house.
‘Well,’ her mother went on matter-of-factly, ‘you know the way his hair’s fallen out and he hasn’t been able to keep things down …’
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