It was approaching noon and, as she walked, the heat was intense on her arms, her legs, the tops of her shoulders. Burrs and sap stuck to her skin, gathering seeds and petals. Inside the woods, the canopy of trees brought some relief. Here, the ground was dry as flint, crisp with pine needles that exuded a dry heat. It was like walking on a bed of matches, and she wouldn’t have been surprised had they combusted beneath her feet. She arrived at a clearing where dozens of trees had been razed and the forest floor sloped to a cave mouth. A timber beam supported the entrance and into the timber two people called AL and RP had carved their initials, or perhaps one of them had carved their initials while the other looked on, indifferent. This place, too, she recognized from her guidebook. It was the cave where villagers had hidden during the war and which had now become a shrine; she recalled an arty photo of candle stubs, little coagulations of gray wax at the bottom of glass jars.
She squatted down and peered inside. The cave was not entirely dark; narrow tunnels burrowed upward, creating runnels of light. Squares of fabric cut from the clothes of the sick, the dying, the already dead were fixed to the walls. She should go in, she supposed; she should try to make the best of this place that Sandra had landed her in, but instead she settled herself on the ground beneath a tree. She shook pine needles from her sandals, brushed the traces of the meadow from her clothes. She leaned her head against the trunk and closed her eyes. The humiliation of earlier had faded a little. It would return, of course, as humiliations always did; it would wait for her in the long grass of memory. But for now there was a restfulness to the light that filtered through the trees, a tang, like incense, to the scent of pine needles.
She dozed a little. When she woke she found that the sun had somehow pierced the barricade of leaves, and a patch of skin on one arm was pinkening. She opened her bag to get sunscreen and there it was: Etta’s book, or, rather, Etta’s mother’s book. Why on earth hadn’t she left it behind in Gariano? She turned it over in her hands, gingerly, as if it might scald her, and knew immediately that she would never again buy a book in that particular shade of blue, or any book translated from the French, for that matter. There would be no more Sacher torte or nutmeg, either. So many things irrevocably spoiled.
She got up and walked around to the other side of the tree, positioned the book upright against the trunk. But that was littering, wasn’t it? She picked it up again. She could leave it in the cave, she supposed, next to all those grotty jars. She could pretend it was an offering of some sort, except some do-gooder might find it and attempt to repatriate it. She pictured pudgy do-gooder fingers punching out the phone number for Etta’s mother. Walking a little distance from the cave, she scuffed at the ground with her sandals until she had a patch cleared of pine needles. A pointy stick looked like it might be of use. She poked the ground with it, but without much effect, and so she poked harder until it broke. She tried a stone then, which worked better. Dropping to her knees, she began to dig. When she encountered a root, she threw aside the stone and tugged, broke the root, flung it from her with a small yelp of triumph.
She continued digging with her hands until it occurred to her what she must look like: an animal crouched in the dirt, clawing. She stood up quickly and glanced about, as if someone might be watching her, laughing at her—a whole new level of foolishness!—but there were only trees, tall and inscrutable. Now that she’d stopped digging, there was utter silence apart from the back-and-forth of a bird on a branch above her head, the barely perceptible, flinted movements of its feet like the striking of tiny matches. She became aware of sweat running down her face. She placed the book in the hole—though it was not so much a hole as a small indentation—and heaped pine needles on top. It was a rather pathetic effort, she thought, when she stood back to observe it. No doubt come nightfall, a fox or other wild creature would come sniffing around; it would pick up her scent and, frenzied with hope, would dig in expectation of something bloody. She pictured the book dismembered, pages from spine, and scattered over the forest floor, its blue cover scored with the imprints of many small teeth.
She found a track that led back out to the meadow, but at a different point to where she’d entered earlier. There was a breeze and the grass rippled in a sea of dark greens, light greens, and silvers. She could see, a little distance away, the Rifugio and someone—Allesandro, she presumed—doing something with a ladder on the terrace. Farther uphill, half a dozen horses were grazing. The last film she and Sandra had seen together was set in medieval France, where horses kitted out for war—huge, apocalyptic horses in the king’s colors—had galloped in a regal charge through cobbled streets, sweat glistening on their flanks. These horses were nothing like that. Most were not horses at all, but shaggy ponies. Possibly, one or two were donkeys.
Seemingly as one, they raised their heads from the grass and stared. The intent with which they regarded her was touching, as was the graveness with which they stood at attention, as if they had been waiting, as if her emergence from the woods had summoned them to a different, nobler, calling. She returned their gaze, keeping still, very still, even the in and out of her breathing as quiet as possible. Then she realized they were not looking at her, but past her. A figure was making his way up the hillside, a bucket in his hand. He came a little way up before halting and putting down the bucket. He cupped his hands around his mouth and began to call. The horses broke into a trot, then a canter. Then they were barreling downhill, their unkempt manes flying, their tails streaming out behind them. The slope brought its own momentum, and they were galloping now, neighing and snorting and whinnying. They thundered past, trampling on daisies, forget-me-nots, buttercups. And as they went by, she stepped back into the trees, to shelter from the clouds of yellow dust flung up by the chaos of their hooves.
Her mother’s room was on the second floor with a view of the river and the Coca-Cola bottling factory on the opposite bank, neat rows of red-and-white trucks resembling from this distance a child’s toy collection. Aileen had planned to deliver her news on Friday evening; that way, if things didn’t go well, her mother would have time to come round before Aileen had to leave again on Sunday. But fog at Heathrow delayed her flight and then there was a queue at the rental car desk in Cork and a problem with a form, so it was almost eight P.M. before she arrived at the nursing home.
“Aileen,” her mother said, “you’re late.” Her mother was propped up in bed, her slight frame barely denting the pillows. Settled by her bedside, in the room’s only chair, was Eily, one of the other residents. Eily was tall as well as broad, her white curls adding several inches to her height, and when she leaned forward in the chair, she eclipsed Aileen’s mother almost entirely.
“Sorry,” Aileen said, “my flight was delayed.” But her mother and Eily had already resumed their conversation. It was something about the new podiatrist and his tendency to be rough with the pumice stone. Her mother’s problems, being terminal, were far beyond the reach of podiatry, but, still, she debated the subject of calluses with an intensity that was unsettling. Aileen went to stand by the window while she waited for them to finish. Their conversation had a curious dynamic—a decorous yet vaguely malicious chipping away at each other, the way a child might pick slyly at a scab. It occurred to her, fleetingly, that were she to deliver her news now, Eily’s presence might possibly temper her mother’s response. It wasn’t that her mother had anything against grandchildren; but Aileen’s sister, Janet, had already provided four, and the circumstances of Aileen’s pregnancy—forty-three, unplanned, married work colleague—were not what her mother would have hoped for.
The nursing home had once been a convent, and it retained a cloistered feel. Cell-like rooms branched like pods off narrow stalks of corridors, and in the wall behind her mother’s bed, there was a curious rectangular indent where it looked like a door had been papered over. Usually when she was home from London, she stayed in her mother’s house in Ballyphehane, empty these days apart from a cat the neighbors had been
entrusted with feeding. But Janet had rung earlier in the week to say that this time Aileen should book a hotel. There was now a tenant in their mother’s house, because, as Janet had rather bluntly put it, it wasn’t as if their mother would be moving back in. Aileen imagined a stranger, a girl—because for some reason she was sure the new tenant was a girl—working her way through the house, opening first one drawer, then another. “I guess this is what it feels like to be burgled,” she’d said to Janet.
Janet had sighed. “It’s nothing like being burgled,” she said. “Why does everything have to be such a drama with you? I was only saying that to Mam the other night.”
“So Mam knows?”
“About the house? Gracious, no! We were talking about something else.”
“But what about my things?” Aileen had said. She’d pictured the girl—in clearer relief now: fair-haired and fine boned and dressed like a cat burglar—finding diaries from Aileen’s teenage years, items of graying underwear forgotten in the airing cupboard.
“You haven’t lived in that house in twenty years,” Janet said. “What things could you possibly have there? If it makes you feel any better, I moved a lava lamp and a box of ornaments up to the attic.”
—
IT WAS LATE MAY, and the evening was still bright. Outside on the grounds, neatly pruned shrubberies descended into briars and mounds of fermented grass cuttings as they approached the river. Since Aileen’s visit the previous month, floods had taken away part of the boundary fence, and someone had bridged the gap with a length of blue rope, tied between posts like a finish line. It was tempting fate, Aileen thought; it was downright irresponsible in a place like this. She imagined her mother and Eily, shuffling and elbowing, as they tumbled downhill to land head over calloused heels in the black mud of the riverbed.
Eventually, Eily stood up, gathering her dressing gown around her, and shuffled toward the door. She paused to raise a hand, hip height, in half salute, though her expression was so vexed the gesture could just as easily have been interpreted as a threat. When Aileen sat in the vacated chair, it still held traces of Eily’s warmth, and she took off her coat and folded it underneath her to serve as a cushion.
“I knew all the Reardons from Liscarroll,” her mother said, “and there was never any of them a dentist.” A filigree of bruises from the hospital drip was visible on the inside of one arm. “There was a Reardon a vet, all right,” she said. “A vet of sorts, but never a dentist.” This was her mother’s latest pastime: scrutinizing Eily’s ancestry. Each new fragment was committed to memory to be dissected in Eily’s absence, inconsistencies hunted down with a doggedness usually reserved for war criminals. Her mother’s hand crept across the blankets and beat up and down at the edge of the bed. “Janet brought me a book the other night,” she said. “You might as well take it away.” The book, a copy of The Road—a curious choice for the terminally ill, Aileen thought—had fallen to the floor, and Aileen picked it up, put it back on the locker. “Take it with you when you’re going,” her mother repeated. “Things only go missing here,” and she rolled her eyes in the direction of Eily’s room.
From the corridor came the squeak of rubber-soled shoes and a trundling of wheels. A young woman in a blue aide’s uniform parked a cart in the doorway. “How are we this evening?” she said, squeaking her way across the floor. She lifted Aileen’s mother’s hand and placed a finger on the underside of her wrist. The finger was plump and fat. Aileen’s mother’s skin was almost transparent, veins winding in blue rivers beneath the surface.
“Dorene,” her mother said, “this is my other daughter, Aileen.”
Dorene let go of her mother’s hand and took a pen from the pocket of her uniform. She wrote something on the chart clipped to the bottom of the bed. “Daughter?” she said, as she peeled back the blanket and sheets on one side. “Why, you could be sisters.”
Aileen felt offended, then immediately guilty, for was her mother not entitled to this at least, this small, transparent lie? She watched Dorene place a hand on her mother’s back and roll her onto her side, as her other hand pulled taut the undersheet. There was something supremely confident in the way Dorene, who couldn’t be more than thirty, moved her mother: easily, matter-of-factly, a careless squandering of touch as if this was something she did every day, which, of course, it was. Aileen suddenly felt very tired; tired and incompetent. If she could lift the baby out now she would. She would pass it, red and dripping, across the bed to Dorene. Dorene would know what to do with it. And Aileen knew then that she wouldn’t be able to tell her mother about the baby this evening; she wouldn’t be able to tell her anytime in this strange place that was half motel, half mortuary.
“I thought we might go for a drive tomorrow,” she said, as soon as Dorene had gone. “Just you and me. I thought we might go to the seaside.”
—
“I COULD ASK JANET to drive us,” her mother said the next morning, as they stood on the porch of the nursing home. As she spoke, she patted the outcrop of silver curls at the nape of her neck, a nervous habit she’d had since Aileen was a child, though the curls had been brown then, and thicker.
“I know how to drive, Mam.”
“It would be no trouble to Janet,” her mother said, staring at the car parked beside the curb. “She could be here in twenty minutes.” Aileen knew then that her mother had already asked Janet; that Aileen’s driving—the likely hazards of it—had been debated in apocalyptic fashion until all her mother’s troubles, even her illness, had paled beside the threat of a daughter home from London in a rented Fiat. Reminding herself that she mustn’t fight with her mother, Aileen said nothing, just linked her mother’s arm and walked her to the car.
They drove south along the coast with the sea on one side, and, on the other, ditches swollen with gorse and the lush, wanton grass of early summer. Last night, in a three-star hotel on the edge of the city, Aileen had taken out a map and decided they would go to Courtmacsherry, where her mother’s family came from and where her mother had holidayed each summer when she was a child. Her mother was a poor passenger, flattening herself back against the seat every time they rounded a corner. Her hand flew to her throat if they overtook a lorry. Not a driver herself, she wasn’t prepared to believe Aileen was one, either.
Janet texted to say she would meet them for coffee in Kinsale. Couldn’t she have allowed her this one day alone with their mother? Aileen thought. But there was no safe way of saying this to Janet, no way that mightn’t end in a row, so she’d said yes, of course, yes, please join us. Aileen and her mother were first to the café and sat at a table by the window. Aileen ordered coffee and a scone. Her mother ordered a pot of tea and a boiled egg, though boiled eggs weren’t on the menu, then went to use the bathroom. Aileen thumbed through a copy of a local newspaper. She’d noticed a shift these past few weeks, her gaze falling on things previously skipped over, and now it settled on an article about hatches in Germany where women could leave their babies. She imagined something like the clothes-recycling unit outside her office. Babies tipping over into warm, scented heaps of other babies, downy and milky and sleeping; babies plopping into warm darkness, the occasional soft cracking of skulls like eggs.
From behind the bathroom door she heard the muffled drone of the hand dryer, a drowsy, muted buzzing, like a bee trapped in a curtain fold. It stopped, started up again, stopped again. Her mother came out, wiping her hands on a paper tissue. “I don’t know why they bother with those things,” she said. She sounded more relaxed now, heartened perhaps by the fact that they had arrived unscathed. She took a plastic tub from her handbag and shook a blue cylindrical pill into her palm. Placing it on her tongue, she took a mouthful of tea and tipped back her head in a quick, jerky movement. She pressed a napkin to her lips, held it there a moment.
Janet’s car pulled up outside. The eldest child, Keith, the one who looked most like Janet’s husband, Richard, was in the passenger seat, the other three strapped into booster seats in
the back. Janet took a while to parallel park, the minivan awkward and cumbersome, grazing the bumpers of the cars in front and behind. Then she swiveled round in the driver’s seat, presumably, Aileen thought, to shout at the children, because she seemed to shout at them a lot. Instead, she produced from somewhere on the floor of the car a multipack of crisps and proceeded to distribute them. She got out of the car, locked it, and hurried up the steps of the café. “I couldn’t get a babysitter,” she said. “But we won’t be long, will we?”
Now that Aileen saw her mother and sister together, there was a likeness—something in the nose, the chin—that she hadn’t noticed before. The four children stared in from the car, eyes fixed on their mother, aunt, and grandmother. The older ones expertly ferried crisps to their mouths with small hands while the baby pulled at the teat of a bottle. Janet appeared to be expanding at the same rate that their mother was shrinking. Her sweater, one that Aileen had given her the Christmas before last, was at least two sizes too small. Janet settled herself in the chair beside her mother, directly opposite Aileen. “How are things in London?” she said.
“Pregnant,” Aileen wanted to say. “Things in London are pregnant,” but she didn’t. She wondered how Janet would react when she, in turn, learned the news; pregnancy up to now had been Janet’s territory. But Janet wasn’t listening for her reply. She was looking out to the car where Keith was force-feeding crisps to the baby. “I’ll crucify him,” she said, and Aileen had an image of the boy nailed to the wall outside the café, blood dripping onto the flower boxes below. Janet jumped up and banged on the glass. “Stop it,” she shouted. Inside the café, conversation ground to a halt, but outside, the children carried on regardless. Janet ran outside, tugged at the locked car door. She felt her pockets for the keys she’d left on the café table. “Open the door,” she screamed.
Dinosaurs on Other Planets Page 9