Dinner Party

by Sarah Gilmartin

  ‘Mammy,’ Kate said, rapping on her door. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  There was silence and Kate eventually left her alone. She went down to the kitchen and took a box of Lucky Charms from the press, poured herself a bowl. It was all plain old oats, not a pastel-coloured marshmallow in sight. Elaine the cereal miner had gotten there first.

  The rest of the month dragged worse than any other January Kate could remember. No more Christmas, no more millennium, no more birthday, no more Peter. Life itself seemed to be disintegrating.

  Easter came early that year, and with it the hope that things might improve. It had been a long winter, full of dark, brittle days. Their father had spent more time than usual on the farm, making up for Peter’s absence. Their mother was largely the same—silences or tantrums, little in between. The mood about the house was at once lonely and suffocating. Late at night, if you paid attention, you could hear the walls pulsing with the weight of it all.

  But on Holy Thursday they came downstairs to find their mother frying eggs in the kitchen. Fully dressed, smelling of lilies and humming a song from Carousel. On Good Friday, she filled a Trócaire box with coins and told them to pretend they’d been doing it for the whole of Lent. Yesterday she took the twins to town and bought them magazines and Icebergers, and this morning, she burst into their bedroom in a swishing pale-yellow dress that Kate hadn’t seen in years. On their way to mass, Daddy said she looked like Easter itself and they’d all packed into the Jeep, laughing at their mother’s impression of a chicken.

  Things had gone even better from there: mass with the quick priest, Creme Eggs outside the church, lunch in the hotel and free chocolate bunnies from the basket by reception as they left. Now they were in the car park of the hotel, waiting for Mammy to finish her endless woman conversation with Marise Murphy, so they could go home and open their big eggs, which were stacked on top of each other on the mantelpiece in the television room.

  The wind was up, and the men were already in the car. Kate and Elaine were leaping about the tarmac, trying to steal each other’s bunnies. In front of the car park, the long manicured lawn looked soft and inviting, the tall pine trees in serious green columns at either side. Just as Kate was about to make a break for it, their mother called them to the car. There wasn’t a hint of Easter in her tone.

  As Kate opened the door of the Jeep, she heard Marise say to her mother, I believe the police were involved, Bernadette. Less than a minute later, their mother was climbing into the passenger seat in a ruckus of yellow, banging the door shut.

  ‘How are the births, deaths and marriages?’ Daddy made his old joke.

  ‘Drive, Francis,’ her mother said, staring out the window. ‘Just drive.’

  They set off on the bendy road in silence, the bunny melting in Kate’s hands. When they got home, her parents went straight to the television room, closed the door and the shouting began. Not even Elaine was brave enough to go in and ask for the eggs.

  It was late now, past midnight, the trio of love songs on Atlantic 252 long over. Kate was still awake, staring at the neon constellations on her ceiling. The shouting had stopped only an hour ago when their mother had left the house in a rage, tearing down the gravel in the Jeep, thundering over the cattle grid. Shortly afterwards there’d been the rev of another engine. Kate had bolted out of bed and gone to the window—Daddy’s van skidding down the driveway almost as fast as Mammy.

  In the creaky quietness of the house, Kate was still trying to piece things together from the snippets she’d overheard. In conclusion: Peter had gone off the rails in America, and it was all Daddy’s fault for letting him go. It was a proper scandal, Kate understood that much, something to do with Peter and a Mexican girl—an illegal immigrant, a fucking refugee. There was a child involved too but it was not Peter’s, at least Kate didn’t think so. Your stupid son is being taken for a ride all over Mexico town!

  Though she tried to stay awake, Kate kept drifting off. She woke with a start to the sound of voices and didn’t know how long she’d been out. For a moment she was sure that something bad had happened, but it was OK, there was no shouting downstairs, just the murmuring that was always so comforting to hear after the storm.

  Elaine coughed in her sleep, raspy and short like a sick old man. She’d been at it throughout the night. That’s what happened when you didn’t brush your teeth after four eggs. Looking at her shuddering beneath the covers, Kate wanted to pat her on the back. She turned over herself instead and tried to count the stars and planets but gave up at thirty-nine. It was no use. She was wide awake. The moaning downstairs had gotten louder and it sounded like more people than her parents. Maybe Ray was with them, maybe he’d been the saviour of the night. Imagine that. Kate giggled and switched on the reading lamp. Elaine gave another cough but didn’t wake.

  On the locker Kate’s copy of The Catcher in the Rye was ready to go, but it was the kind of book you had to concentrate on and she didn’t think she’d be able in the middle of the night. What time was it, anyway? She turned the digital radio to face her. 4.47! It was the latest they’d ever been up. Kate rooted in the locker for her Sweet Valley High, an old favourite, the one where Jessica dyed her hair black to become a model.

  But no, the pages were all blurry and boring, and she decided to get up. It was only an hour before Daddy would usually wake so she couldn’t be in that much trouble. She borrowed Elaine’s velvet hoodie and closed their door softly behind her. On the landing, it felt like Christmas morning, that nervous anticipation as she put her foot on the first step, testing. She wished Copernicus would appear with the bright red bow on his collar.

  At the end of the stairs she could clearly hear convulsions coming from the kitchen. She switched on the lamp beside the telephone table and the hallway walls lit up around her, white as clay.

  The fight was not over.

  She would be better going back to bed. And yet her hand gripped the shiny polished ball at the end of the banister and spun herself down the hallway. Her feet prickled with the cold floor, and every budge she made towards the kitchen seemed to make the crying louder. Her poor Mammy was very upset. Kate would hurl herself towards her when she got into the kitchen. She would ignore Daddy and go straight for her mother and hug her about the middle, just the way she liked.

  ‘They didn’t,’ her mother cried out. ‘They wouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she heard a stranger’s voice say. ‘Sit up here.’ They said something else then but the cries drowned it out.

  Kate was trying desperately to tune in to the voices, to pick out her father’s even tones through the crisis. She nearly jumped out of her skin when she felt the icy hand on her shoulder.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Elaine. ‘It’s five o’clock in the morning.’ Her hair was like a nest on her head and she had nothing on over her nightie.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kate. ‘Something bad.’

  Elaine crossed her arms over the Garfield picture and rubbed away the cold.

  ‘Drink this,’ the stranger’s voice said. ‘Come on, now, Bernadette.’

  The cries broke off.

  ‘Good girl.’ It was another voice now, recognizable and strange all at the same time, like when you hear a movie star doing a cartoon. ‘That’s it,’ the voice said. ‘Good girl.’

  ‘What the hell?’ Elaine pushed past Kate and flung open the kitchen door.

  Mammy was bent over the table, the bottle of Daddy’s good whiskey in front of her.

  Kate tried to run towards her but something prevented it, physically held her back. She stopped in the middle of the kitchen and couldn’t move. She could barely draw breath. It wasn’t Mammy’s red face or the stranger woman that did it either. It was the sight of Granny, right there behind Mammy at the table, rubbing her hair.

  Elaine screeched into the dimly lit kitchen, a horrible animal sound.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Granny ran towards her and brought her to the table. ‘It’s OK.’ She was in the f
loral housecoat that Mammy hated.

  The stranger woman, who was not a stranger at all, Kate could see now, but Conor Doyle’s mother Brenda with the ginger curls, also went to Elaine. She said the same thing as Granny. ‘It’s OK. It’s OK.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Kate, still stuck to the spot. ‘It’s OK?’

  No one answered her.

  Her mother flung herself forward on the table, pounding her fists off the wood before giving up and slumping against it.

  ‘Come over here, Kate,’ her Granny said. ‘Good girl.’

  Kate didn’t move an inch. ‘Where’s Daddy?’

  ‘Come over to me.’

  ‘Where is he? Where’s my Daddy?’

  ‘No!’ her mother cried. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Granny,’ Kate pleaded. ‘Where is he?’

  Brenda Doyle shook her curls and blessed herself.

  Tears were falling down Elaine’s face, and still Kate didn’t get it, not really.

  ‘He’s gone, my love—’ Granny squeezed Elaine’s shoulder, ‘my little loves, he’s gone.’

  Without seeing her move, the Brenda woman was suddenly up close against Kate, drawing her into a milky-smelling cardigan, the wool rough against Kate’s face.

  Kate couldn’t breathe. She pushed her away. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. My Daddy!’

  Elaine was bawling, clinging to Granny.

  ‘Please,’ her mother said to no one. ‘Please.’

  Elaine started to shout their father’s name into the night. Copernicus began to bark. Granny turned on the lights over the table and the kitchen was suddenly alive.

  ‘I can’t,’ her mother sobbed. ‘I can’t. Get them—please.’

  Then they were both being taken by the hands, pulled out of the kitchen, back into the blue darkness of the once familiar hall.

  CARLOW

  September 2006

  By the time they got going, it was late afternoon and the sky was heavy and dull. In the passenger seat of the Opel, Kate looked over her shoulder and saw her mother standing in the doorway of Cranavon, the thick fingers of wisteria almost touching her head, a mass of moving purple in the wind. She had not come down to say goodbye when they were leaving. Kate waved back at her now but her mother’s hand didn’t move. Perhaps they were already too far down the driveway and Mammy could no longer see into the car. In her royal blue dressing gown, she looked like a lonely monarch. For a few seconds, before they reached the rusty cast-iron gates, Kate wanted to tell her brother to stop, to reverse, to crunch over the gravel once more and allow her the chance to say a proper goodbye before they hit the road to Dublin.

  ‘Mammy’s there at the door,’ she said.

  Ray turned onto the boreen. He was bringing her back to college, to Trinity Hall in Dartry, which was so popular it had taken until third year to get a room.

  ‘Bit late for that now,’ Ray said. ‘I’ve enough of The Noise to do me till Christmas.’

  As they went through the crossroads, Kate checked her Nokia just in case but there were no little handsets or envelopes on the screen. ‘I didn’t mean to set her off earlier.’ She tugged at the seat belt, tight across her new red cardigan. No matter what way she fixed the strap, it dug into her. Even now, years later—a reminder. No belt, a neighbour had said in the queue at her father’s wake. Straight through the windscreen.

  ‘I wish Daddy—’ Kate said, swallowing hard.

  Ray jolted the gearstick and the engine moaned. He turned on the radio to her favourite Killers song. She looked out the window, her eyes flitting over her reflection in the wing mirror.

  ‘Daddy was very good to you,’ Ray said eventually. ‘But don’t be maudlin, Katie. It’s a brand-new year. And don’t worry about herself either, she’ll be grand. Doesn’t she have Peter? You just get yourself sorted for college. In your swanky new digs.’

  Kate smiled. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to be back in Dublin.’ She considered her outfit, wondering if it was suitable for halls. They were her best pair of bootcut jeans—no scraggly bits from capillary action—but not everyone was wearing bootcut these days. On the back seat, her favourite black coat, a cape of sorts, which her mother said looked like a shroud. Well, her mother was wrong: it was, in fact, a cocoon.

  ‘Do you know who you’re sharing with?’ said Ray.

  ‘I’m not in the sharey ones. Cunningham Hall only has single rooms.’

  ‘Better off,’ he said. ‘Remember my hovel in UL?’

  ‘Watch the road,’ said Kate, as he swerved around a bend.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She hated her nervousness in cars, which was so like her mother.

  ‘You’re as bad as Mammy,’ said Ray.

  ‘I am not!’

  Their mother no longer drove, and bringing her anywhere was like having a time bomb in the passenger seat.

  Ray said, ‘Single rooms. Like, is it a bedsit? What about cooking?’

  ‘Fourteen of us to a kitchen. You can come in, see for yourself.’

  ‘I’m going to have to leg it,’ he said. ‘You don’t have much stuff.’

  It was true, she seemed to need less as she got older. She glanced at her brother: clean-shaven and the fringe spiked to heaven. ‘Are you off somewhere with Liz?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Of course it was Liz. He’d enough aftershave on to spice Christmas. They’d been going out all summer and it was cute, the way he was still trying to impress her.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Just plans,’ he said. ‘Things to do.’ He hit the top of the steering wheel. ‘Getting rid of this old banger for one.’

  Her brother was all business since he got the job in the rehab centre in Dún Laoghaire. Raymond is helping cripples, their mother liked to say.

  ‘Well for some,’ said Kate.

  ‘Are you nervous? Is that it?’

  ‘No.’ She looked out the passenger window.

  ‘You’re full of secrets these days,’ Ray said.

  The greenery of the back roads, thick and stooping, chinks of light in the gaps.

  Ray said, ‘I’m only joking.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s all right to be nervous.’

  ‘None of the girls got into halls.’ She meant her friend Jenny, really. The rest of them didn’t bother with her so much. ‘But I don’t care. It’s a hundred times better than Mrs Collins and her digs.’ For the first two years of college, she’d lived in Rathgar, in a dusty old-person room with a spongy mattress and no hanging space.

  ‘Mammy liked that she was from Borris,’ said Ray. ‘And at least she fed you. You’ll miss that.’ He looked sideways at her with his hooded eyes.

  ‘I won’t miss the damn curfew.’ If you weren’t back by eleven, you had to sleep elsewhere. Kate had kissed at least three boys she’d no interest in just to get a bed.

  ‘Ha,’ said Ray. ‘Like prison.’

  ‘Or an asylum,’ said Kate.

  ‘Stop your messin. We’ve no time for messers here.’ Ray did an impression of Peter, the face that was so like a guard’s when he was mad.

  ‘Ah, he’s all excited these days,’ Kate said. ‘The ploughing championships at the end of the month. Carlow’s on the map!’

  ‘What if Peter meets someone at it,’ said Ray. ‘An actual female. A lady farmer.’ He listed the essential qualities of the imaginary woman.

  ‘Don’t forget acreage,’ said Kate.

  ‘And a creamery,’ said Ray.

  ‘Maybe some sheep?’

  ‘And a few chickens to keep her busy in the mornings.’

  They were having so much fun they nearly missed the exit for the motorway. Ray squeezed in behind a Micra and all of a sudden, the smooth, slick tarmac seemed to swallow them up like a dark river and carry them away from Carlow.

  As they passed the sign for the toll bridge, Ray switched to the hurling. The jaunty voices of the commentators made her feel sick but she said nothing. She looked at
the lush autumn colours of the trees that lined the motorway and wondered who had thought to plant them. Closing her eyes, she said a silent goodbye to her home town, to the torquing path of the Barrow and the spire of Myshall Church, to the patchwork fields and the cows, and to the people, too, who only knew her for her loss. First her father and then her sister—two deaths in one family in a matter of years. You didn’t come back from that. Hereabouts they were no longer the Gleesons, but the poor Gleesons. This was never going to change, and some people in the family seemed perfectly happy with that.

  Though her room was on the ground floor of Cunningham Hall, Ray insisted on helping with the suitcase. Her new key jammed in the lock when she tried to open the bright orange door at the end of the corridor. Ray took off his sunglasses. ‘Give it here,’ he said. ‘You have to pull and twist.’ The door sprang back but he closed it again before she’d a chance to see anything. He tapped the shiny number six in the centre of the door. ‘Now, you try,’ he said.

  Inside, the room felt small with the pair of them and her father’s maroon leather suitcase flat on the carpet. It was nearly five and the sun had already passed. Kate hit the switch by the door—a too-bright, flickering light. She was glad she’d taken Elaine’s polka-dot lamp from home.

  ‘It’s cosy,’ said Ray. ‘Definitely meant for one.’

  Elaine and herself would fit fine, she thought. They’d manage.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Ray unzipped his jacket.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely. I can see the old house out the window.’

  And it was lovely, her own space, the pleasure of that. She was being foolish. She’d managed two years already at college without Elaine. Why would she go backwards now?

  ‘Will I help you dress the bed?’ Ray looked at his watch.

  ‘Nah, don’t worry. I’ll unpack first. Drown the place in perfume.’