‘The troops,’ Mother mutters, ‘the American soldiers. They’re making too much noise. Every night, every night …’ Her voice trails away.
Trish looks at Norah. For direction, explanation.
‘She’s wandering,’ Norah says.
Mother stirs and opens her eyes, startled. She is not as frightening to look at as Trish had feared. In fact, she looks strangely innocent as if her mental regression has smoothed away the creases of age, as if she has undergone a purifying process.
‘Victor,’ she says feebly.
‘Daddy isn’t here,’ Norah says evenly, ‘it’s just me and Trish.’
‘Victor,’ she repeats, ‘I’ve done something terrible.’
Trish and Norah stand up, each holding one of their mother’s hands, primed for a confession.
‘Victor,’ she says, ‘I’ve killed a cow.’
Trish catches Norah’s eye. They are both seized by a terrible giddiness. Norah is the first to titter, then Trish takes it up and soon they are laughing uproariously, spluttering behind their hands, unable to stop. Trish has images of her mother in a bullring, flourishing a red cloak, while a hapless cow veers and staggers towards her. The sacred cow, the fatted calf, the images come thick and fast. Norah is bent over double in the chair, tears streaming down her cheeks, groaning with mirth. A nurse comes to the doorway.
‘Ladies!’
Trish and Norah look up at her, then at one another and a fresh volley of laughter explodes between them.
‘Out!’ the nurse commands.
They obey, still unable to stifle the laughter.
‘I hope you realise,’ she says sternly, ‘that hearing is the last of the patient’s senses to go.’
They only sober up when they are left outside in the corridor and the nurse closes the door of the room on them. They do not look at each other for fear of setting each other off again. They loiter in the hallway. The stairwell of the building is glass-covered, an atrium filled with the blush of a spring sunset. After the darkness of the room it is almost as if it is they who have passed into another dimension – celestial and luminous. It soothes them. After a few minutes, the nurse opens the door of their mother’s room and beckons them in, standing sentry by the door, her arms folded like a sceptical constable. She shakes her head gravely. Norah moves towards the bed. She stops. Trish hears a strangled sound, animal, primitive. It seems to emanate not from Norah’s mouth but from somewhere deep in her belly. Trish is shocked; Norah is sobbing messily. She clutches at Trish’s shoulder and burrows into her. There is a painful lump in Trish’s throat where all her own feelings seem to have lodged. Here it is; she takes a deep breath. Mother is dead. And we laughed. Did our mocking gaiety kill her, she wants to ask. Were Mother’s last words a final lucid gift or another of her florid meanderings? But there is no one to ask. She can feel the knobs of Norah’s spine through the thin fabric of her blouse. Her body, huddled against Trish’s heart, feels broken. Absurdity and grief, that’s what they are left with, and between Norah and herself a kind of equality. In the face of death they are equally at a loss. She strokes Norah’s hair. It smells of Mam and nettle shampoo. Capelli.
SICK, DYING, DEAD AND BURIED
Audrey Challoner has a glass-topped coffee table in her living room. Underneath is a removable tray divided into compartments of different sizes like the cubbyholes in an old-fashioned haberdashery counter for spools and pins and bobbins. The compartments house a series of whimsical objects – six marbles in a dish with tongues of blue and yellow like fossilised snails, a tiny tri-wing model aeroplane with Nazi insignia, a brooch depicting a spray of fuchsia and a sprig of green, an ornament of a swan with ruffled china feathers and a gaping chasm in its back (for flowers, a pincushion?), a small doll with a rag body and a plastic head crowned with a mop of blue hair, and a high-tinted, scallop-edged postcard from the Sixties, it must be, showing a beach scene in County Wexford. The items, seemingly random but so deliberately displayed, mystify because they are at odds with their surroundings.
Audrey’s place, her friends say, pristine! You’d think it would be cluttered and homey; you’re expecting a candy-coloured crochet throw over the sofa, some bold patterned curtains, a Turkish kilim on varnished floorboards, framed group snaps from adventure holidays abroad. Not this. Unadorned magnolia walls, beige carpet, a sofa the colour and texture of oatmeal. The blandness unnerves. It is not what they imagine of their Audrey, who is capable and cheerful and a bit of a bohemian. She is single and coming up for fifty.
Her bedroom, not often seen by visitors, gives a glimpse into Audrey’s inner life although it’s more library than boudoir. White bookshelves climb from floor to ceiling; there are teetering piles of paperbacks beside the bed – the in tray – and another scattering of volumes in smaller towers on the bureau in front of the window. Just now, for example, spine up, face down on the counterpane, is a slim volume of short stories, entitled Diaspora by an Irish writer, Ted Gavin, from a small university press in the US. Audrey is a demon on the Internet. At her book club – first Saturday of the month, a group of women of a certain age – she riles as often as she entertains. The others find her reading choices odd and pretentious because they are so determinedly not mainstream. She eschews the bestseller lists. She favours short stories over novels, because, she tells them, her concentration is fatally flawed.
‘I’m plunged so deep into other people’s lives at work that when I come home, I want something I can escape from easily.’
Perhaps that’s why her flat seems like somewhere Audrey is perched, rather than inhabits. Her friends will tell you that Audrey resides here, but she ‘lives’ elsewhere, the children’s ward at St Jude’s Hospital, they mean. That is her world. Children with cancer. So when new acquaintances see Audrey’s coffee table collection, they wonder if the items belong to child patients Audrey has cared for at St Jude’s. Dead children. But they would be wrong. Audrey’s treasures belong to the living. That is, living, as far as she knows.
It was the day her first child died, nearly thirty years ago now. His name was Phillip. Phillip Prince; it’s a name she will never forget. Summer as if in insult crowned at the window, shimmering trees rustling on blue when he breathed his last. She feels motherly about Mr and Mrs Prince now but then they seemed no more than careworn shadows. Phillip was their first child. They can’t have been much older than Andrey was, but then she was a young nineteen. His parents sat by his bedside, a hand apiece manacling his five-year-old wrists, as if that might hold him down, keep him here. His bald head and translucent skin made him seem like an ancient sage. Soon he would be. Soon he would know more than the three adults in the room about the darkness that falls after death.
Audrey knew it had happened before the parents. She’d never seen anyone die before but she had heard about the death rattle and she recognised it when she heard it because she was youthfully proficient and, unlike Mr and Mrs Prince, she was not saddled with hope. But she wasn’t brave enough to make the pronouncement. She could do the cheery optimism, which mostly meant telling barefaced lies to the child, but not this awful verdict. She got up busily as if she had somewhere to go, someone to see, and made blindly for the door. Then she was ploughing down the sunlit corridor like a sluggish swimmer. She needed air, she told herself. She could see the sliding doors ahead of her, opening and closing like a pair of lungs but she knew she could not inhale until she got outside. The air came in leafy gasps, the rose garden a blur of peach and lemon. The hospital kiosk, like a doll’s house, stood in the midst of the furred bloom, its ice-cream machine humming whitely. A child – a healthy child – in a smocked dress was being handed a cone by an unseen adult hand, a flake plunged into its creamy whirls, the tip curled like an elegant question mark. Audrey did not want to see one jot of childish pleasure; it wasn’t enough to be outside, she realised, she needed to get away completely. Away from this sick place.
The avenue beyond the gates to the hospital was lined with houses. There
were aprons of communal green in front of them where a crowd of the neighbourhood children played. Audrey had come to know them through their games. Hunched over jacks on the cracked pavement near the gates of St Jude’s, intent as ancient seed-throwers. They would scatter the jacks – like tiny metal models of atoms – then throw the spongy black rubber ball high in the air. Before the ball bounced they had to harvest all the strewn jacks, cupped in their palms or balanced on the front of their hands. The rhythm of the game always fascinated Audrey; the scattering so insouciant, the attempts at retrieval frantic.
Out on the street the children played sprawling games of soccer, Cops and Robbers with clothes-peg guns, German jumps, hopscotch. Though they weren’t supposed to, they often infiltrated the grounds of St Jude’s, which gave them plenty of cover for games that involved hiding. Like Sick, Dying, Dead and Buried. This was a new one for Audrey. Here’s how it worked. One child was on the den and counted to ten. The others splayed out and hid. At the end of the count they had to emerge and find another refuge. The child who was ‘on’ was armed with a ball and tried to target the others as they darted about. The aim was to kill by degrees. One strike of the ball and you were sick, two and you’re dying, and so on. Did other kids have such morbid games in their repertoire, Audrey wondered, or was it a response to their proximity to St Jude’s and the omnipresence of painful death?
But the day Audrey was trying to escape, the children were not involved in play. They were collecting for charity. They had set up a row of stalls along the avenue, five or six upturned orange boxes with planks set across them. Someone had made a banner, strung between a pair of bamboo sticks. It was made of an old sheet with a message scrawled inexpertly on it in black magic marker – HELP BIAFRA! The letters spelling help were large and capacious but the word Biafra was crushed together and downward falling where the childish hand had run out of space. Against her will, Audrey halted.
* * *
‘We’re going to have a bring-and-buy sale,’ Norah Elworthy announces, ‘for the starving children of Biafra.’
Norah is going through her religious phase. Soon she will lose her vehement faith. The death of her father will shake her belief not only in God but in the goodwill of the universe. But for now it is intact and she is emboldened by this opportunity afforded by a civil war thousands of miles away on the continent of Africa. It is not hard to convince her young companions. They are Irish, after all – famine is lodged in their DNA. The dread of the workhouse and the stench of the coffin ships lurk in their collective memory. They have read about the Great Hunger in their history primers, heard their parents argue about it with rebellious relations who bang the table after too much drink and talk darkly of blight, yellow cornmeal and Empire. But, more immediately, they are responding to beetle-browed Norah Elworthy, who, even at ten and a half, has a commanding presence. She is their moral compass and a bossy-boots. She it was who told them there were child patients in St Jude’s Hospital at the end of the avenue, and who, when they disbelieved, led them in single file around the back of the ward buildings to prove it. She pointed to the bald kids tied to drips in the upper windows and mouthed the words of the Gospel: ‘Suffer the little children …’
For the charity sale Norah divided the kids into pairs and ordered them to call to every house on Prosperity Drive, Barry Denieffe remembers. She was like a general, or a political canvasser. She dragooned adults as well as children into her plan. She was the kind of kid adults liked, or liked to think they resembled when they were young. Which is why even Miss Larchet, who was pretty stuck-up most of the time, contributed, giving them jewellery – a garish red and pink brooch, a string of beads, a swan ornament thing. If it had been Barry she’d probably not have answered the door; he had rung the bell too often asking for his ball back when it sailed over the high creviced wall of her back garden, which ran along the stretch of road where they played their makeshift games. If she did give it back, it was accompanied by a peeved complaint about her Calla lilies being snapped and broken by his uncouth games. Uncouth – it was the first time he’d heard the word.
‘We need good stuff,’ Norah had told them. ‘Proper things that we can sell.’
If the adults demurred, she told her troops to say: ‘Jesus says we must give until it hurts.’
Although Barry couldn’t remember Jesus ever saying such a thing.
‘Enabling’ is how he will describe Norah at his AA meetings thirty years later, surprised that she figures in his addiction confessional.
‘But in a good way,’ he will add hurriedly. Some words in this parlance of redemption have been traduced.
He had never thought much about Norah in the intervening years; well, you don’t, do you, unless there’s call for it? Childhood companions get lost, some of them literally. He remembers Finn Motherwell, claimed by asthma when he was eleven. Died on the street during a game of soccer. Barry has cause to remember. He was lining up for a shot at goal when it happened. Finn was standing guard in the goalmouth marked by two woollen cowpats on the concrete. Barry dummied at the last minute, knowing that Finn would go the wrong way. Even at that age, his instinct was never wrong. (The killer instinct; that’s how his last manager in Colchester described it when he put Barry on the transfer list. The killer instinct he no longer had.) Finn dived away from the swerving ball – GOAL! – and fell awkwardly. He never got up. What would have happened if Barry had missed? Or if he’d lost the ball in a tackle with one of those Devoy boys a minute before he took aim? Would Finn still be alive? Barry has spent years brooding on this, although Finn’s name never comes up at AA. Maybe because Finn is dead. Norah Elworthy, on the other hand, is very much alive. Barry sees her on Prosperity Drive almost every day. He is back at home living with his parents, on the dole, doing odd jobs; she is looking after her mother. But when he spots her, he cannot bear to meet her gaze, let alone talk to her. Ridiculously, he feels Norah Elworthy is disappointed in him.
Dying. Victor Elworthy is all at sea with the word. Yesterday he was living; or at least, he didn’t know he was dying. Now he has moved into the waiting room. Edel is being stoic about it. So stoic that Victor doesn’t know what she’s thinking. Over the years, his wife has become a mystery to him and even this – diagnosis, verdict – has failed to break her secretive carapace. Where once he thought he knew her, now he’s totally at a loss. When they met, Edel had made a play for him; came up to him bold as brass and asked him out. She seemed brazen and direct. Uncomplicated. That’s what he had liked about her. But she had fooled him. Now that they have shared twelve years together, a house, a bed, and two little girls, Edel seems to be the very opposite. She is hidden and helpless, yet full of a shrill kind of resistance to him, particularly where the girls are concerned. As if it was she who had a thing growing in her head.
When the doctor made his pronouncement, Edel drew her breath in sharply then sighed as if someone had taken a burden from her. The consultant, dressed in a white coat like a posh grocer, said the word.
‘How long?’ Victor asked. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to ask?
The consultant pulled a face like a boy found out in a lie. Victor doesn’t even remember what he said; he only knows it sounded like a job estimate – in single figures.
The day before yesterday he was on shift; now he’s ordered to be idle. Because of what the doctor knows. He’s lying on the couch in the back room because it’s darker in here and light disturbs him. He’s always worked nights so he’s got used to being sunk in a kind of twilight. Now he’s been thrust into the daylight and it seems too bright, too busy for him. It’s two in the afternoon and he can hear the girls scampering in and out of the house; Edel has the front door open to save her having to let them in all the time. They’re involved in organising some kind of a bazaar – at least Norah is, and Trish is doing her bidding. Norah’s been back and forth several times with a swag-bag of goodies she’s begged from the neighbours. Tomorrow they’re going to set up stalls on the avenue
and sell the donations for a good cause.
‘For the dying children of Biafra,’ Norah says when he asks. She seems to stress the word dying. Or is that just him?
The children don’t know, of course. Not yet. How could he and Edel tell them when he cannot believe it himself? He can’t believe that this blustery day of early summer, with a little hint of rain on the wind, is his last. He’s alive still, of course, but every day is his last now. He can’t believe that this is how it’s going to end – so soon, so bloody unfinished. He is panicky and calm in equal measure. In the calm moments he lapses into a post-mortem view of himself and his life – like what went wrong with him and Edel. He can admit now that things between them have not been right for years. He thinks it was Patrick – the baby son they lost between Norah and Trish. He’d been dead for some time in the womb, they told Edel, but she hadn’t noticed. That’s when things started to sour, Victor believes. Edel seemed to think that all he’d ever wanted was a son and heir, and that she had failed to deliver. She pre-empted his disappointment by presuming he already blamed her. To tell the truth, he hadn’t cared that much then about his name carrying on. There was time, after all. Now there isn’t and he’s furious.
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