Make Yourself at Home

by Ciara Geraghty

  He wore a suit jacket over his shirt and his tie was straight and arranged in a Windsor knot. His kilt was purple and green tartan today. Rita’s favourite colours. Marianne assumed these facts were not unrelated and she felt a rush of warmth flood through her and she was grateful that Rita had such friends.

  She put her hand out to shake his and he took it and held it, and it was so tender, the way he held it. She thought she might break in two with the tenderness of it. She was suddenly exhausted. She wondered what it might be like to lean against him. Just for a moment. She could breathe him in and feel somehow invigorated. Or maybe not invigorated. But able. Able for the rest of the day.

  She hadn’t intended to actually do it but there she was, all of a sudden, her forehead against his shoulder, leaning against him. She was mortified but not mortified enough to stop. Hugh put his arm around her and she stood still and closed her eyes and leaned. It was warm there, in the circle of his arm. Warm enough to sleep. Today, he smelled of the sea, a salty tang about him. She could feel the hard clench of her muscles stretch and yield.

  ‘I’m so sorry for your loss, Marianne,’ he whispered into her hair.

  She nodded. ‘I’m sorry for yours.’

  Marianne stepped away from him then, tucked a strand of hair that had escaped from the gigantic bun at the back of her head behind her ear, cleared her throat. In his hand, a bunch of … she leaned closer. ‘Are they thistles?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye,’ he said, grinning. ‘They’re prickly but very beautiful. Rita loved them.’ On top of each stiff spine was a tuft of dark pink petals and Marianne had to admit that the contrast was very pleasing to the eye.

  ‘How are you managing?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I’ve been mostly making sandwiches.’

  ‘I make a mean cheese and pickle,’ he said.

  Marianne set him up in the kitchen with a wooden board, a pan of bread, a block of cheddar, and a jar of pickle.

  ‘I do enjoy watching men do menial tasks,’ said Aunt Pearl, admiring him from behind.

  She had surprised Marianne by being helpful. ‘Just because I don’t cook doesn’t mean I can’t,’ she remarked, stirring an enormous vat of soup. ‘Roast butternut squash,’ she proclaimed. ‘It was Rita’s favourite.’ She stopped stirring for a moment and closed her eyes. Marianne thought perhaps it was her use of the past tense. Something so definitive about it. So unchangeable. Then she collected herself and nodded at Marianne. ‘That bread is not going to butter itself, you know,’ she said, nodding to a vast cake of wheaten bread she had baked earlier.

  The house began to fill.

  Marianne could not believe how many people managed to fit in the drawing room at Ancaire where Rita had requested the funeral take place. ‘Spare me your man-made gods,’ she had told the local parish priest and vicar whenever she came across them at various fêtes and fundraisers. ‘I’ll take my chances with Mother Nature.’

  Both of them had come. Both of them had adored her.

  So many people from so many places, all of them with their Rita stories. How she had touched them in her own, peculiar, insistent way.

  When the drawing room had accommodated as many people as it could, Marianne opened the double doors into the dining room and they overflowed in there until that room, too, was full to bursting.

  And still, they came.

  Marianne was glad of them. They gave her something to do. She took their coats and made them tea and listened to their Rita stories, nodded when they told her how like her mother she was, buttered more bread, made more sandwiches, made more tea, put away more coats, listened to more stories.

  Back in the kitchen, she met Shirley, who was taking Sheldon and Harrison to the beach in an effort to distract them from the coffin. ‘I wish I hadn’t told them that Rita was inside it,’ she said to Marianne, grabbing their jackets off the hooks in the back kitchen. ‘I caught them trying to open it. Sheldon was going to throw in a few fairy buns and Harrison had drawn a picture of hell with “Do not enter” in big, red letters. I should never have sent them to the national school.’

  ‘I won’t die, Mammy, won’t I not?’ asked Harrison, skidding to a stop in front of Shirley and sticking his arms out so she could thread them through the sleeves of his jacket.

  ‘Not if I don’t fecken murder you first,’ said Shirley, zipping him up before kissing the tip of his nose.

  It wasn’t until later, through the kitchen window that Marianne saw Patrick, sitting on a stool outside his workshop. He was so still, he might have been carved of wood.

  ‘Can you manage here for a while?’ she asked Aunt Pearl, who was rinsing the dregs of lemon meringue pie out of bowls at the sink.

  ‘I’ve been managing here since before you were born, Marianne,’ she said.

  Marianne pulled on Rita’s old Aran cardigan and headed out the back door. The grass was soggy underfoot with the recent rain and she had to run to prevent her runners sinking into the mud. George ran after her, and Donal and Gerard eyed her cautiously as she flew past them. She was out of breath when she arrived at the workshop.

  ‘Patrick,’ she said. ‘There you are.’ She stepped closer to him. ‘I’ve been wondering where you’d gotten to. Everybody has. Agnes, too. She’s at the house, you know.’

  Patrick did not respond. He sat there, still, his eyes fixed on something beyond her.

  ‘Patrick?’

  He wore a pair of jeans and a thin T-shirt. Along his arms, goose bumps rose and his lips were tinged blue with the cold.

  ‘Come on,’ said Marianne. ‘You’re freezing. I’ll make you some tea.’

  Patrick shook his head. ‘I’m not cold,’ he said.

  Marianne squatted down in front of him, took his hands in hers. They were like icicles. She rubbed them between hers. ‘You are cold,’ she said. ‘You just can’t feel it. You’re in shock.’ He shook his head again. Marianne could hear his teeth chattering in his mouth. ‘We’re going to the graveyard soon,’ she said, as gently as she could.

  Patrick stood up so suddenly, the stool tumbled back, rolled away. ‘I’m not going there,’ he said. There was a ragged edge to his voice. Marianne wished for Rita then. She would know what to say. How to say it. She had always known, when it came to Patrick.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ said Marianne. ‘I just thought … you might like to, you know? It’s supposed to be good for … closure.’ She couldn’t believe she’d used that word. It was such a Rita word. Patrick shook his head.

  In the end, Marianne took his arm and led him inside the workshop, up the stairs, into his apartment. She guided him into an armchair, took off her Aran cardigan and wrapped it around his shoulders. She turned on a lamp, switched on the heating, boiled the kettle. He sat there and let her do all those things without saying a word. He accepted the mug of tea she handed him. ‘Wrap your fingers around that,’ she said. ‘It’ll warm you.’ He held the cup so that the steam rose and curled around his face. Marianne thought that was a good sign.

  ‘If you change your mind …’ she began.

  ‘I won’t change my mind,’ he said.

  Rita had always said Patrick was her brother but Marianne had been too angry feel that connection.

  Perhaps it was too late to feel it now?

  Back in the kitchen at Ancaire, Bartholomew was comfort eating the last of the sandwiches, keeping a watchful eye out for Aunt Pearl, who often cited gluttony as the most heinous of the seven deadly sins.

  ‘Have you seen Freddy?’ Marianne asked him.

  He pointed to his bulging mouth and she waited for him to swallow. ‘I saw him in the drawing room earlier,’ he said when he’d managed to empty his mouth. ‘But that was ages ago. He’s barely looked at me, let alone issued one of his caustic comments. I’m worried about him.’ Bartholomew lifted another sandwich and pushed most of it into his mouth.

  Marianne hurried out of the kitchen. She too had seen Freddy earlier, standing in a circle of people, looking dazed. Not e
ven pretending to listen to their conversation. He seemed preoccupied, as if there was an argument going on inside his head and he was on the losing side.

  She found him in Rita’s studio, sitting on the floor by the window and in his hand was a full bottle of single malt whiskey. On the floor beside him, a crystal glass, empty. He looked up when she walked in, pushed his glasses up his nose and smiled as if he had been expecting her. He raised the bottle. ‘Turns out you were all right about me,’ he said. ‘I am an alcoholic.’

  Marianne approached him slowly, sat on the floor beside him, took his free hand and held it in hers.

  Freddy shook the bottle so that the amber liquid swirled around inside it. ‘I was trying to convince myself that I’ll just drink today, you know? Because of the day that’s in it. Nobody would blame me. It’s what people do, isn’t it? At funerals.’ He sighed a long, shaky sigh, looked at Marianne. ‘But then I realised that if I do, I’ll drink tomorrow too, and the day after that and all the rest of the days. I won’t be able to stop.’

  ‘It’s good that you know,’ Marianne said. ‘It’s better to know.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Freddy. ‘I feel exactly the same.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ said Marianne, gently.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Freddy.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Marianne, and Freddy leaned against her and sighed.

  ‘So now I’m an alcoholic and I’m gay,’ he said. ‘And Rita is gone. It’s just … it’s so unfair.’

  Marianne put her arm around him.

  ‘It’s too hard,’ said Freddy, his voice muffled against her arm. ‘Why does it have to be so hard?’

  ‘If it was easy, everybody would be doing it,’ said Marianne.

  Freddy lifted his head and smiled then. ‘You sound just like your mother,’ he said.

  ‘Well, there’s worse ways to sound, I suppose,’ said Marianne.

  They sat there like that for a while. Marianne could see her breath when she breathed out. She was glad of the warmth of Freddy’s body, beside her.

  ‘My bottom’s gone numb,’ said Freddy after a while.

  Marianne scrambled up and hauled Freddy to his feet. ‘Day one hundred and twelve,’ he said, handing the bottle to Marianne. He pushed his shoulders back, did his best to swell his narrow chest.

  ‘Day one hundred and twelve,’ said Marianne, brushing specks of plaster that had drifted from the ceiling off the shoulders of his jacket.

  It wasn’t until they were at the graveyard that Marianne knew that her mother was gone.

  She had known it before then – of course she had – but the knowledge had been theoretical in the main.

  The graveyard brought everything into sharp focus.

  She supposed it was because there was nothing else to do but watch Rita’s wicker coffin being lowered into the ground. No sandwiches to make, no kettles to boil, no stories to listen to, no names to remember.

  It was just Marianne, standing still and watching her mother being lowered into the ground, beside her sister. The deep, wide gash in the earth, the soil dark and glistening where it had been turned. She thought that some day, when the earth had been restored and the grass had returned, she might feel comforted by the idea that Flo and Rita and William were together. That they had each other.

  But not today.

  She shivered in the damp air, the sky overhead seeming to lower in the gloaming. Freddy and Bartholomew, on either side of her, put their arms around her shoulders. Ethel and Shirley, standing behind her, slipped their hands into her frozen ones. Sheldon and Harrison were playing chasing around the headstones and it was a mark of the day that Shirley did not admonish them in her loud, expletive-ridden way. It fell to Aunt Pearl – who disapproved of all children in general and of Sheldon and Harrison in particular – to reprimand them, which she did by hissing at them. This stopped them in their tracks as surely as if they’d been frozen in place.

  Of Patrick, there was no sign.

  Afterwards, the handshaking. Marianne was not a fan of handshaking. All those germs.

  ‘You have to do it,’ said Aunt Pearl. ‘People want to pay their respects.’ She snapped on a pair of black leather gloves. ‘I’ll assist.’

  Marianne did what she was told. Every time she looked up, the line seemed longer than before. People didn’t just want to pay their respects. They wanted to tell their Rita stories.

  ‘Hello, Marianne.’

  She looked up. Standing by the gate with his hands in the pockets of a black overcoat that seemed two sizes too big for him, was Brian.

  ‘Can you manage on your own for a few minutes?’ said Marianne to Aunt Pearl, who glared at Brian before nodding grimly. ‘Two minutes,’ she said.

  Brian looked exhausted, his face wan and the skin dark and puffy beneath his eyes. They stood in front of each other for a moment and it was Marianne in the end who took charge of the situation. She put her arms around him and did her best to hug him. Had the frame of his body always been so slight? He felt like a bag of bones between her arms. She was pretty sure she could sling him over her shoulder and run the length of the beach with him without breaking a sweat.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Marianne.’

  ‘You’re good to come.’

  ‘Was she sick long?’

  ‘It was quick in the end.’

  It sounded like all the conversations that had gone before. Like lines learned off by heart.

  Surely she and Brian should have a different script?

  ‘You look … Are you okay?’ said Marianne.

  Brian shook his head and drew his hand down one side of his face. Marianne could hear the scratch of unattended stubble. ‘Yeah, I’m fine, I’m just … I haven’t had much sleep lately. The babies are colicky.’

  ‘Colicky?’ Marianne thought it sounded like a made-up word.

  ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ said Brian. ‘I’m so tired of talking about colic and nappy rash and cradle cap and wind and the texture of stools, I … Sorry, Marianne, it’s just the tiredness. I’m like a bag of cats. Did you know that sleep deprivation is one of the most effective torture methods? I’d go a step further and say it’s the most effective one. I mean, the twins are great, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes, I honestly think I’d give one away in exchange for eight hours’ sleep. But no, no, of course, I’m only joking. Well, not joking exactly, this is not a place to joke. I know that. This is a funeral. Your mother’s funeral. I’m so sorry, Marianne. Did I say that already? Don’t mind me. Just … you talk now. Tell me how you are. How are you? How are you doing?’ Marianne had never heard Brian say so much in one go. His words tumbled out, one after the other with no pauses or intonation. A flatline of speech. His eyes were glassy and unfocused.

  He had the eyes of a dead person. And his breath. Damp and gastric. Marianne took a step back. Brian looked at her. Really looked at her. She could not ever remember being so scrutinised by him. ‘You look amazing,’ he said, his dead eyes wider now, the better to see her. ‘It’s …’ His dead eyes roved around her face, her person. ‘It’s your hair. And your face. You’re glowing. You’re not pregnant, are you?’

  ‘Brian!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, I keep being inappropriate, my boss called me in the other day to tell me I had parked in the CFO’s spot. Can you imagine?’

  Marianne shook her head. Brian clenched his dead eyes shut. When he opened them again, they were watery as well as bloodshot and Marianne was terrified that he might cry. She had never seen him cry and suspected that he might be an ugly crier, too.

  ‘I miss our old life, Marianne.’ He whispered the words.

  ‘Brian, I don’t think you—’

  ‘We had such an ordered, calm, comforting life. Didn’t we?’

  For a moment, Marianne allowed herself to remember. Their home. The white linen couch. A three-seater so they could sit at either end and stock their books and paperwork and the remote control in the middle. A Thai takeaway on F
riday nights. A nature programme on the television. Walking down Howth pier. The throw cushions on their bed. Their pyjamas folded neatly under their pillows. The water in the tank always warm when you wanted to have a shower.

  ‘The sale of our old house fell through,’ said Brian then. ‘Did you know that? It’s back on the market. You could sell Ancaire and buy it back. I know how much you loved that place.’

  The news came at her like a defibrillator against her chest, her heart leaping inside her. She had done her best to put the house on Carling Road behind her. ‘Move on,’ Rita had told her. ‘It’s time.’ Maybe this was what she had meant? Selling Ancaire? Buying her old house back?

  Her home.

  ‘Marianne?’ She turned and saw Hugh. ‘I just came to let you know that Pearl says she’s going to drag you back by your hair if you don’t return immediately.’

  ‘Oh, yes, fine,’ said Marianne. The three of them stood there for a moment. Then Hugh extended his hand. ‘Hugh McLeod,’ he said in his enormous voice that carried around the entire graveyard.

  ‘Inside voice,’ shouted Shirley and he grinned, prompting his vivid green eyes to disappear into slits on his face.

  Brian’s body jerked up and down with the strength of Hugh’s handshake. It was horrifying to watch. Brian gaped up at Hugh when Hugh released him. ‘You’re so enormous and vibrant,’ he said helplessly.

  ‘And you are?’ enquired Hugh with a twitch of a smile.

  ‘This is Brian,’ said Marianne.

  ‘We used to be together,’ said Brian, ‘and then I wrecked everything.’ He bowed his head, ran his hands through his – thinning, Marianne couldn’t help noticing – hair.

  Hugh glanced at her with his eyebrows arched. She put her hand on Brian’s arm. ‘Take care, Brian,’ she said.

  Brian lifted a hand in a sort of exhausted goodbye. Marianne turned and made her way back to Aunt Pearl and the endless line of people and the germ-ridden hand-shaking.

  As she resumed her position – ‘Thanks for coming, yes, Rita would be delighted with your rig-out, no, just donations to Sister Stan at Focus Ireland. Rita would really appreciate that’ – she saw Hugh lead Brian out through the gate and up the road towards the car park.