Make Yourself at Home

by Ciara Geraghty

  ‘How long are you staying?’ Aunt Pearl barked then.

  ‘Not long,’ said Marianne. ‘I’ll be leaving as soon as I … as soon as I sort things out.’

  ‘So you have a plan then?’ said Aunt Pearl, sitting even straighter in her chair.

  Patrick picked up his glass and, in her peripheral vision, Marianne could see the sharp angle of his Adam’s apple scrape along the taut skin of his throat.

  ‘Give her a chance, Pearl,’ said Rita, reaching across the table to collect the empty bowls. ‘She only just got here.’

  There was a clatter of hoofs, and the long-haired goat Marianne had spotted earlier in the garden ran into the room, doing a lap of the table, stopping beside Rita, sniffing hopefully at the trolley.

  ‘Who let that animal in again?’ asked Aunt Pearl icily.

  ‘He must have smelled the peas,’ said Rita, bending to pull gently at the goat’s long coarse beard. ‘You love peas, don’t you, Gerard?’

  ‘It’s unhygienic,’ said Aunt Pearl. ‘Animals in a dining room.’

  ‘Gerard keeps himself very well,’ said Rita. She stood up and pushed the trolley towards the door, breathing hard as she navigated it over the hump of the saddle board. Gerard trotted after her. With the rattle of the trolley, Rita’s high heels and the sharp clip-clip-clip of Gerard’s hoofs, Marianne fought an urge to clamp her hands over her ears.

  Patrick distributed plates around the table. The same blue and white dinner plates with repeating patterns of ships and anchors and waves. When she was a child, Marianne had had to stand on a kitchen chair to reach them. She’d fry an egg, arrange beans like spokes around it. ‘Guess what it is,’ she’d say.

  ‘The sun,’ Flo would reply.

  ‘Are you all right, Marianne?’ Rita asked when she returned, scattering bowls of vegetables around the table. ‘Do you not like the couscous? Don’t worry, I have mash as well so—’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Marianne. Rita handed her a plate with chunks of turnip and carrot and mushrooms in a dark red sauce dotted with chickpeas and butterbeans and whole cloves of garlic and sprigs of rosemary. Marianne couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. Had she had breakfast? She often didn’t eat before she went to work, but then the cart would come round at eleven and her colleagues would form an orderly queue in front of it and Marianne would be reminded to eat. With the absence of a workplace and the snack cart and her colleagues it hadn’t been all that easy to remember, these past months.

  She pushed the vegetables around the plate with the fork.

  Rita was talking. She had been talking for ages, as far as Marianne could tell.

  ‘… so I suggested to Shirley that we …’

  ‘Your dinner will get cold,’ Marianne said.

  ‘It always does,’ said Aunt Pearl.

  Rita ploughed on as if nobody had said anything.

  ‘… just five minutes in a room with that nasty man and—’

  ‘Most men are nasty,’ cut in Pearl. ‘You’ll have to be more specific.’

  ‘Shirley’s landlord. Have you not been listening to a word I’ve been saying?’ Rita shook her head. ‘He’s ordered Shirley out of her home by the end of April.’

  ‘Is Shirley the single mother?’ Aunt Pearl’s mouth curled around the words.

  ‘She’s the mother of two adorable boys,’ Rita said briskly.

  ‘I’m afraid I have met Sheldon and his brother, Harrison,’ said Aunt Pearl. ‘And adorable is not the adjective that sprang to mind.’

  ‘And,’ Rita went on, ‘Shirley doesn’t even have the benefit of a lease agreement to protect her. Or any help from the PRTB because, of course, that article never registered with them.’ She stabbed a chunk of tomato with her fork and waved it about. ‘All he cares about is …’ She looked at Marianne. ‘What do you call it?’ she asked. ‘It’s some type of line. People who are obsessed with money are always talking about it.’

  ‘The bottom line,’ said Marianne.

  Rita beamed. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘My clever girl.’

  Patrick gathered the dinner plates and the tureen and placed them on the trolley. He pushed it out of the room, lifted it over the saddle board like it was a bag of feathers. Rita trailed him. Marianne heard Patrick say something and then Rita’s high trill of a laugh, dribbling away as they moved down the corridor, towards the kitchen.

  Pearl made a tsk noise with her tongue but exactly what element of the evening she was tsking at was unclear. Marianne took off her glasses and worried at them with the edge of her napkin.

  ‘I think they’re clean now,’ said Aunt Pearl.

  Ever since she had started wearing glasses – aged fifteen, during the first week of boarding school, when her maths teacher realised that Marianne was using complicated guesswork to make out the equations on the blackboard – she had taken to them. She favoured heavy, solid frames so there could be no mistaking them, even from a distance. They felt like a shield. They protected her. They announced her. People made assumptions. Serious. Quiet. No nonsense. And even though those assumptions might not be true for everybody, Marianne knew they were true for her.

  Marianne slid her glasses back on and Aunt Pearl came into sharp focus. Her silver-blue eyes were undimmed by her many – might she be ninety? – years. Still as clear and glinting as a block of knives. ‘Really, Marianne,’ said Aunt Pearl, patting her bun to make sure it hadn’t budged, which it hadn’t because it wouldn’t dare to, ‘stealing. I really don’t—’

  ‘Dessert,’ roared Rita, sprinting into the room. Aunt Pearl, who resented her sweet tooth, broke off to inspect the trolley. ‘Is that a roulade?’ she asked.

  ‘Made from our very own raspberries,’ declared Rita.

  ‘Raspberries are not in season,’ Pearl sniffed.

  ‘Patrick froze a few batches of them last September,’ said Rita, smiling at Patrick, who arrived with a pot of coffee and a jug of cream. The coffee smelled dense and earthy. Marianne never drank caffeine after 4 p.m., but she accepted a cup so she could wrap her cold fingers around it, hold her face over the mug and let the steam fold into her skin, warming it.

  ‘So, what is this Shirley woman going to do?’ asked Aunt Pearl, accepting the plate that Rita handed her and guiding it to the table, as gently and carefully as if it were a baby bird that might take flight at any moment.

  Marianne said, ‘No thank you,’ when Rita offered her dessert. She did not have a sweet tooth but even she had to admit that there was something almost beautiful about the curve of raspberries, curling through the circle of thick, wobbly meringue, staining it with their dark pink juice.

  ‘Well,’ said Rita, spooning roulade into her mouth and then speaking long before she had swallowed it, ‘we’re going to stage a sit-in at Shirley’s house before the actual day of the eviction.’

  ‘When is the eviction date?’ Patrick asked.

  Marianne noticed how people sort of froze when Patrick spoke, as if they were afraid that his quiet words might burst like bubbles if they so much as blinked. Aunt Pearl’s napkin, held at the corner of her mouth, Marianne’s hand reaching for the water jug.

  Rita, who had been burrowing for a raspberry that had fallen down the deep valley of her cleavage, recovered first.

  ‘Sometime in April,’ she said, bending to lift a bulging diary out of her handbag. She leafed through it. ‘Of course, the landlord might have changed his mind by then. If not, we’ll throw everything we’ve got at it. Even Aunt Pearl, if we have to.’ She winked at Pearl, who grimaced. ‘I can’t find it,’ she said then, tossing the diary on the table. ‘The light in here is too poor.’

  ‘You might be able to see better if you wore the glasses the optician prescribed for you,’ sniffed Pearl.

  ‘I don’t need glasses, I just need a second opinion,’ said Rita, running the pad of her finger around her plate to collect the last of the cream and raspberry juice, licking it noisily.

  The diary lay on the table, open on the last week
of April. Marianne glanced at it and saw a red X with several exclamation marks and a rudimentary drawing of a matchstick house with matchstick people across the front of it, holding up matchstick placards, each containing a single letter that, together, spelled S.H.I.R.L.E.Y. with love hearts – crayon red – on the placards at either end.

  The eviction date, she presumed.

  She leaned closer.

  It was scheduled for the thirtieth of April.

  Marianne retreated in her chair until she reached the back of it, felt the hard lines of wood dig into her shoulders and down her back, concentrated on that sensation, the press of her skin against the chair.

  ‘Marianne?’ Rita looked at her. ‘You’re as white as a sheet.’

  ‘I’m … fine,’ said Marianne. ‘I …’

  An image of five-year-old Flo bloomed in her mind, as sudden and vivid as a pinprick of blood on the tip of a finger. Flo’s first day at school. Marianne letting go of her hand at the school gates. Flo handing Bruno’s lead to Marianne, bending to kiss the dog’s nose no matter how many times Marianne told her it was unhygienic. Flo’s black patent shoes that used to be Marianne’s, which she had polished so that they shone like new.

  ‘Aren’t you scared?’ asked ten-year-old Marianne.

  ‘Of what?’ Flo said, her blue eyes wide with curiosity.

  ‘Of going to school,’ said Marianne.

  When Flo shook her head, her pigtails flew about her head like chair-o-planes.

  Marianne stood up, the legs of her chair scraping against the flagstones on the floor, making a grating, shuddering sound. Everybody looked up. Their faces seemed small. Far away. Like Marianne was peering at them through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

  ‘I’m not feeling well,’ said Marianne. She turned, moved towards the door. It, too, seemed far away, like a door in a dream.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Rita called after her.

  Marianne shook her head. The door wouldn’t open. Marianne yanked the handle up and down.

  ‘You should take a spoon of cod-liver oil every morning,’ declared Aunt Pearl. ‘A cure-all.’

  Patrick appeared beside Marianne. He performed a complicated, counterintuitive manoeuvre with the handle and pushed at the door which, of course, opened without even a creak of hinge.

  ‘Sometimes it can be difficult,’ he said.

  Marianne swept past him, into the corridor and up the hall. She took the stairs two at a time, ran the length of the landing, didn’t stop until she was safely inside the bedroom, leaning against the closed door.

  The room seemed to mock her. As childish as she was, it seemed to suggest, with its unchanged landscape, Flo’s bed on the other side of the line, the pillow plump and smooth, the sheets and blankets beneath the counterpane neatly turned and tucked. Marianne knew they were because she had turned and tucked them herself. Every morning. Just as she had turned and tucked her own. She hadn’t minded. She had loved the order of the made beds, everything in its place, just as she had left it. It had been the only room in the house that she could count on. Where everything was just so.

  Now look at it. The sheets and blankets of Marianne’s unmade bed in a tangled clump on the floor. Marianne looked through the window. All she could see was the sea. It looked the same as it always did, the constant movement of the grey water, the curl of the waves closer to shore, their tops frothy and white, the thump of the water against the dark sand, against the sharp rocks, against the base of the cliffs. It had looked the same on the thirtieth of April, twenty-five years ago. It had sounded the same. To Marianne, standing at the window with her face pressed against the glass, it seemed like everything was the same. Nothing had changed.

  Not even Flo, who would always be ten. Who had been ten for the past twenty-five years.

  Chapter 4

  Marianne got into bed in a pair of tracksuit bottoms, one of Brian’s old T-shirts, a fleece and a pair of slipper socks. Essentially, her clothes.

  In spite of this, Marianne was cold, and the cold, coupled with the rock-bottom condition of her situation, made for a fitful night’s sleep. Whenever she woke up, which she seemed to do at intervals, the mean time of which came in at thirty-seven minutes, according to Marianne’s calculations, she spent the first few minutes trying to work out where she was. When she remembered, she felt a fresh gush of grief, surprised by the strength of it every time. The way it took her breath away like a punch to the solar plexus. She calmed herself by thinking about a piece of furniture in her home.

  Like the splendour of the matching Vienna vases on either side of the hearth in the sitting room, filled with identical artificial flowers. All you had to do was shake the dust off them every few days and they were as good as new. Not one visitor had noticed that the flowers weren’t real. Not that there had been many visitors, Marianne conceded. Mostly Brian’s sister, Linda, on her twice-yearly visits from Guernsey. Linda, who had raised Brian after their parents died when he was twelve and she was eighteen, was a taciturn woman. She had never mentioned the artificial flowers although Marianne suspected that had more to do with her disinclination to speak in general.

  Marianne had never been keen on inviting people into her home. Ancaire, by contrast, had always been full of strangers. Rita told her daughter that there was no such thing as strangers; just friends who hadn’t met.

  Brian didn’t take any of the furnishings when he left. He said it was only fair, since Marianne had chosen most of them. And gone to such trouble to do so. As if spending a Sunday afternoon in a furniture outlet in Kildare sourcing the perfect coat stand was trouble.

  Before she met Brian, she had long since accepted her status as a ‘singleton’. Not that she would have classified herself thus. The word implied youth and sinew and suppleness and a future that was not yet squandered. In fact, she embraced it. She lived alone. She slept alone. In her divan bed, so solid that even the most strenuous of tossing and turning would not produce so much as a peep or a creak out of it.

  She worked alone. From the spare room in her apartment that she had converted into an office.

  She had gone to boarding school alone. Then the scholarship to Queen’s University. Her accommodation was tiny and basic. She shared a bathroom with six older girls. The water was never hot when it was her turn for the shower. The accountancy course was gruelling, with a high drop-out rate. Marianne didn’t speak to any of her fellow students and, after a while, they stopped speaking to her.

  She graduated top of her year and was offered her pick of jobs. She chose one that allowed her to work from the tiny flat in the apartment block she rented at the top of Griffith Avenue. Marianne liked how secure it felt. And how bright it was, with double-glazed windows looking out over the Tolka river. The back garden was so untamed, none of the other residents ever went out there so it felt like it was all hers and there were nights in the summer when she lay there, hidden by the tall grasses and watched the stars bloom like flowers across the darkening sky.

  If company policy hadn’t changed, requiring the homeworkers to move into the head office in the IFSC, none of this would have happened because she wouldn’t have met Brian in the kitchenette on the fifth floor.

  At 4.37 a.m., there was a scraping sound which, at first, she ignored. It was probably the branches of the silver birch, laid bare by winter, bent by the wind tap-tap-tapping against the windowpane. After a while she realised the sound was coming, not from the window but the door, and she concluded that it was mice scurrying behind the wainscoting.

  At 4.46 a.m., with the scraping sound growing in intensity, Marianne flung the bedcovers back and quailed against the immediate onslaught of cold that the action produced. She marched to the door, for it was clear now that the sound was coming from the other side of it, and flung it open.

  There, his paw cocked in mid-scrape, was a dog. He was neither young nor old. He was a middle-aged dog. A tall, thin, middle-aged dog, with coarse fur the colour of water left in a sink. A
stagnant grey. His eyes fixed on Marianne and he cocked his head to one side, his ears like antennae on his head, upright and quivering.

  Marianne shut the door and got back into bed.

  Despite the menagerie of animals that Rita facilitated, she had never got another dog after Bruno.

  The dog on the other side of the door continued scraping at the door with his nails, which, from the quality of the sound they produced, needed to be cut.

  Marianne pushed her head under the pillow, gripping it around her ears, the better to drown out the sound.

  The dog continued to scrape but also to whimper, and it was this whimpering sound – aching and forlorn – that felled Marianne in the end.

  She wrenched open the door and glared at him. ‘What?’

  The dog responded by licking at a patch of skin above Marianne’s ankle, in the space where her tracksuit bottom ended and the slipper sock began. ‘Stop it,’ she said, stepping back. The dog walked into the room. He circled the space on the floor beneath Marianne’s bed before settling himself there. He glanced at Marianne, who stood at the door. ‘Shoo,’ she said, pointing out to the landing. The dog blinked slowly, once, twice, then stretched his front paws out in front of him like the slats of a bed, arranged his head there, and fell asleep.

  In the end, Marianne, frozen with the cold, had no choice but to get back under the covers. She came at the bed from the bottom to avoid the dog, crawled to the top, wormed her way back inside.

  She woke at 5.30 a.m., roused by the dog’s snores, each of which was so loud and long, it caused her grandmother’s collection of glass in the dresser below to vibrate against the shelves.

  When Brian snored, Marianne took to the spare room. She did the same when either of them had a cold. Or a cough. When she had her period. When one or the other of them had to get up earlier than the other the next morning.