by Boyce, Niamh
Half an hour later he was still spitting fire over the damn book. Opening it and letting out exclamations of outrage at whatever offending sentence he happened to pounce on.
‘This has to be reported. Brought to the gardaí; it’s the only thing. You can’t have this sort of smut around a girl like Sarah, it will contaminate her mind! Listen to this: “‘Mrs Betty,’ said he, ‘I fancied before somebody was coming upstairs, but it was not so; however,’ adds he, ‘if they find me in the room with you, they shan’t catch me a-kissing of you.’”’
He slammed it shut, glared at his wife. Opened it again … read a section, snapped it shut. Glared. Opened it … on he went, over and over again, with the same exaggerated expression of wide-eyed horror. It reminded Carmel of a Charlie Chaplin film. She just wished it were a silent one. Was this the same man who’d whispered once a week like clockwork, ‘Do you want to go to bed, love?’ Like his own lust was a meek weekly cuckoo.
If that’s shocking you, Dan darling, thought Carmel, I could say something that would really get your cuckoo hopping. She smiled but couldn’t keep her eyes open and dozed off by the fire. Maybe she should’ve listened more carefully.
28
One Saturday after work, when Sarah was looking forward to collapsing in a heap, Carmel asked her to take a message to Emily’s. She set sheets of brown paper on the counter, parcelled up some bacon and then a fruit soda.
‘That should be enough, for what’s left of the Maddens now.’
She cut a piece of string with her teeth. Sarah really wished she wouldn’t do that, nibble on string like a rat. The bacon grease darkened the paper as soon as it was wrapped.
‘Used to be, let me see, Mo, Brian, the four young ones, and the lad that helped. That’s seven altogether. Now look what’s left: just Emily, Charlie and their father. How things change. The house is well in off the road, on the right, behind hedges let grow high. A run-down house with a madman’s garden. You’ll know it when you see it.’
Carmel gave her a sharp look and handed over the parcels.
‘Now don’t dally.’
How like Carmel to forget that Sarah’s working day had ended an hour earlier.
Sarah began to wonder if she had passed the house when the hedges began to swallow the road and she saw a narrow gap where an open gate leant back. There was fuchsia on either side: Sarah popped open a red bud and stepped through. The house was a large square two storey. It must’ve been a fine building at some stage, but now the stone was smothered in ivy, and the window-frames were rotten. The garden was overgrown with nettles, poppies and foxglove. It felt lush and heavy. It made her notice things, like the smell of lilacs after rain. It made her want to lie down.
A hammer tapped on tin. A young man sat on the ground at the side of the house, his back against the wall, a bucket between his legs. It must be the brother, Charlie. Sarah was shocked at how handsome he was. Dark and well built, nothing like Emily. Tarzan with his clothes on. She walked towards him, but he didn’t look up. She even coughed but still he didn’t look up. Sarah’s shadow crossed him. He jumped to his feet, let his hammer fall. Frowned at her. God, he was gorgeous.
‘Mrs Holohan sent me with this.’ She raised her greasy parcels. ‘Is Emily about?’
‘She’s in her room – go on in. It’s at the top of the stairs. Mind you don’t frighten her to death.’
The front door was open; the cracked red-and-black hall tiles were gleaming. The stairs were bare and scuffed. At the top, something touched Sarah’s shoulder: a wilting piece of flowered wallpaper. Sarah gave a gentle knock on Emily’s weather-beaten door and lifted the latch.
Emily was kneeling on the ground. If she was surprised, she didn’t show it. She nodded hello. A dress pattern fluttered on the floor in front of her, with cotton fabric tacked to it. The draught created as Sarah shut the door set pins rolling across the carpet and made the paper flap. Emily sighed. Scattered on the floor were coloured spools, scraps of fabric, a pin cushion full of needles, cards of darning cotton, skeins of embroidery cottons, a jar of buttons, another full of hooks and eyes. Emily had huge shears in her hand.
‘Wait a tick.’
Sarah sat on a chair. Despite the disorder on the floor, Emily’s room was beautiful. The white bed-cover was embroidered with a border of bluebells and violets. The pale grey curtains were also embroidered at the edges and held back with swathes of blue velvet. Miniature patchwork dolls lined the windowsill, perfectly attired, and each with a different felt hat. She watched as Emily began to tack together the pieces she had cut out. She worked quickly. There was a treadle sewing machine sitting beside her bed in the way other people had nightstands.
‘Where did you learn to sew?’
‘I learnt in school, and from Mam. Didn’t you?’
‘Only to hand sew.’
‘Sure what’s the difference?’
Not the welcome that Sarah had expected.
‘What’s the occasion?’
‘Oh, I don’t have an occasion yet. This is the kind of dress I would wear to a dance. Only then I’d make it from satin. A bias-cut of the darkest blue, with a row of tiny pearl buttons.’
The fabric on the floor was yellow cotton. The colour of a duckling. Poor thing – as if she’d be invited to a dinner dance. Emily lifted the whole ensemble on to the bed as carefully as if it were a baby.
‘The leg-of-mutton sleeves are fabulous,’ she murmured to herself.
Emily turned then and looked at Sarah as if she had only just noticed that she was a real live visitor. She seemed at a loss as to what to say. Sarah handed over Carmel’s parcels.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Emily asked.
‘I would.’
They went downstairs. Charlie was at the kitchen table having his own tea amidst the debris. Sarah gobbled the generous slab of buttered fruitcake that Emily set before her. Charlie looked over at her.
‘In some sort of trouble, Em?’
‘No, I’m not, Charlie. This is my good friend Sarah.’
‘The one who took your job?’
‘Yes, the very one.’
On the walk home, Sarah realized that she and Emily had something in common. They had both lost their mothers. Sarah didn’t feel the loss the way Emily must; didn’t know any way different. When she was a child, she had often pestered Mai about her mother, asking where she was buried and why they couldn’t visit her grave. Mai didn’t like to talk about her sister; she just stayed silent and then would get fired up and point up towards the main road.
‘That’s the way, that’s the road to the town where your mother’s buried. Now skedaddle down it if I’m not good enough for you.’
She had meant to look before this, but almost every daylight hour was spent doing Carmel’s bidding. Well, she was on her own time now. Sarah set out to find her mother’s grave.
The cemetery was set across the railway bridge, around a falling-down church whose stonework seemed knitted together with ivy. She walked the narrow paving towards the back, where it was wilder, where the headstones were older. The graves of the wealthier families were marked with big granite crosses set behind ornate railings. The smaller iron crosses were less imposing but had more flowers: pansies that looked like a bunch of butterflies, ox-eye daisies and pale blue forget-me-nots. Inside the walls of the derelict church were graves of heavy slabs set flat into the ground. Sarah sat on one, resting herself. Wondered if the stone slabs were there to keep the dead in, or the living out.
She’d heard a story once about a woman who’d been buried alive. Her grave was opened by two men intent on robbing her of any jewels. One of the grave-robbers tried to cut off he
r finger. He was after her wedding ring. She woke screaming and the thieves ran off in fright. What a way to wake up. Though only for the robber she would’ve woken to a much more horrible fate. She could’ve died scratching the lid of her own coffin. So sometimes bad brings good along with it. Sometimes.
Sarah was consoling herself and she knew it. She was growing something. There was the sickness, the tears and then the getting fatter despite eating nothing. How hard the ground had felt beneath her that night. Get up, do what you came to do, Sarah Whyte. Sarah rose and began to read the names on the gravestones.
She had no luck finding anyone with her surname. Why wasn’t she surprised? And she had spent too long among the headstones; it was nearly dark. Perhaps she was wrong to be searching for her mother’s grave. Mai was the only mother Sarah had known. She had delivered Sarah. Delivered lots of babies but had never married and had one of her own.
That night Sarah dreamt she was dancing in high shoes, handed down, black. Her best, which someone else had broken in. The pied piper of Hamelin played the Walls of Limerick. How she hated the Walls of Limerick. Tapping feet, open sesame, abracadabra. He reached in and took a plastic bunch of roses from her stomach. A clown, a circus. Some carnival. She heard the crunch of steps on gravel.
‘We must learn about solid matter.’
Who said that? Whoever it was, he woke her up. She lifted back the bed-covers and went to look out of the window. There was no one there.
Sarah wondered what Mai was doing. Was she also awake? Mai was often called upon at odd hours, to go to odd places. Seldom said much when she returned; was never a one for telling stories. As a midwife Mai dealt quietly with whatever the sins of the flesh brought her way. A woman of few words, Sleep well … Morning, child. Kind – you never met kinder – but she wasn’t popular. Men didn’t know what to make of where she put her hands. And she didn’t gossip enough to get on with women. When Sarah got that bit older, Mai often brought her along but never introduced her by name, always said This is my sister’s child, God rest her. Sarah once heard a gangly widow imitate Mai. ‘My sister’s child, God bloody rest her!’ And she’d roared with laughter.
Why so mean?
Sarah’s mother died giving birth. The grave far off, down that road, the next town over. That’s all Sarah was told. Was it a different road, a different town? Sarah tried to remember.
Pray for her in your head. You don’t need a grave. Enough said.
And, after making sure his wife’s final resting place was in Ireland, Sarah’s father ended up buried with strangers in Staffordshire. All Sarah had were Mai and Gracie and her cousins. And now she was going to bring shame on them.
Sarah got back into bed. She was getting wider. There was no getting away from it: she was expecting. She had drunk Mai’s raspberry tea till it came out of her ears, taken every remedy she could think of, but she had still ended up with this beautiful secret, a sweet one. A time bomb.
She slipped her hand beneath the blankets, over the new hard warmth of her stomach, and sang a lullaby for the child, the hidden child.
‘Hush a bye,’ she whispered, ‘bide your time. You’re safe inside.’
In truth, she was terrified. She couldn’t stop time. Redcurrants ripened, the washing line was full of whites, and the sky was a heat blasted blue.
Sarah felt a rising panic. Think of something else. She thought of school, of inkwells – who could have known she’d miss those inkwells? White chipped inkwells sitting into her desk. The Master standing over her. A stain spreading across her copybook. Her name in Irish. Sorcha. Strange in her mouth. Like the word ‘blotter’.
She drifted off and dreamt a mixed-up dream. There were kiss curls, jars of Vaseline in a row, red ants and black ants. Someone rubbed her cheek as she fell from her dream to oblivion, and she heard a whisper, Mai’s voice: It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right, a leanbh.
29
Mrs B was in a terrible way – came into Kelly’s when I was there and said she couldn’t find Rose.
‘But it’s only two o’clock in the day,’ said Mrs Holohan.
‘Why so worried – isn’t she all of sixteen?’ I added.
‘Ach, what would either of you two know about good mothering?’
Mrs B had tried to be nice to me since Mam died, but she kept forgetting.
‘You see,’ said Mrs B to Carmel, ‘she’s not that well; she’s rather frail, not able for much sun.’
‘I’m sure one afternoon of warmth won’t kill her.’
Mrs Holohan was even grouchier than usual. Maybe Dan was casting his eye over their shop girl’s big bum. She should’ve kept me on. I’d have been less of a temptation, seeing as I had a man of my own, and no behind to speak of. Think of the devil and he shall appear. Dan arrived in wearing his sermonizing face. He shook out the newspaper.
‘You’re not going to believe this propaganda!’
Mrs Holohan set her head on her arms, so she could at least be bored in comfort. Mrs B suddenly had something important to do, so I scarpered too.
It was one of those days when I just felt homely on our road, glad to know every bump and turn. The hedges were alive with butterflies, berries and bindweed. The sun was like a warm hand on my neck. It felt like Mam was reaching down from heaven, touching me with her love.
I didn’t wait for the gate. I squeezed through our hideout hedge and into our garden. When I was small I used to crawl through it on my belly, with my elbows walking me through the grass like a red injun. Mam used to tie feathers in my hair and draw stripes across my cheeks with her lipstick.
I heard a laugh. A girl’s laugh. I put my hand to my eyes to block the glare of the sun. Sitting on our parlour window-ledge, swinging her feet, was the fragile Rose. Charlie was inside, leaning out of the open window with his elbows on the sill. She looked very small, sitting there, very young. She wore a red-and-white floral dress with a narrow white belt. I was most put out. Didn’t she have a big fine house of her own without coming to our run-down one?
Charlie was talking away, his head to the side, looking up at her face. And she was smiling. Was he telling her about the desperado coming to hide out in our parlour? Was he telling her everything about us? She pulled a branch from the tea-rose bush, twisted off a small flower and handed it to Charlie. Charlie put it behind his ear. He looked funny. It made me smile.
I started walking towards them. Rose saw me first: she stopped laughing and hung her head, as if I was a mean person who didn’t want people to have fun. Charlie hopped out on to the gravel.
‘Hey, Em,’ he said before I could ask any question. ‘Rose came to see you, to see about that dress you’re making up.’
‘Come back next week,’ I told her. ‘I’m a very busy woman.’
I watched her walk to the gate with Charlie; she seemed in a terrible hurry all of a sudden. She must’ve remembered she’d a mother. What was Mrs B so afraid of, that she couldn’t let her daughter out of her sight for more than a second?
Charlie was all for sweetening me up when he came back – gave me a hug and a penknife. It wasn’t new or anything. Better than that, it was his favourite penknife altogether. Our father got it for him, years ago, when he’d had some sober days. It had a screwdriver, a corkscrew and a good sharp blade. The blades and handle were polished. It looked like a glinting fish, and it was heavy and smooth to hold.
‘I can’t take that, Charlie.’
‘Oh, yes, you can.’
‘Give me your second best one.’
‘It wouldn’t be a gift then. It would be a hand-me-down. You’ve enough of them.’
That’s how I became the prou
d owner of a blade that would take the eye out of you. All so’s I wouldn’t ask too many questions. Charlie seemed so touchy about that girl. Jumping up when he saw me in the garden, when all I wanted to do was join them; it would’ve been nice to have had a bit of fun around here, a bit of chatter.
‘I near forgot about the present I have for you.’
I got my mending bag, fished out the sausages Birdie had given me and put them on a saucer.
‘You’d never be short if you married Birdie.’ I punched his arm and he went brick red.
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Have I hit the spot? Have you finally fallen for Birdie’s charms? You’ll make a lovely couple walking up the aisle.’
He laughed then. ‘Ah, feck off.’
Birdie had been mad about Charlie since he was a child – always had a sweet or a broken biscuit for him. ‘Sugar face’ was the name she had for him. Since Mam died she’d taken to calling me in from the street to give me cold sausages or sliced ham or rashers for ‘poor Charlie’. As if I’d no stomach. I liked her, though. She was gentle, and so very small. And she missed Mam something terrible.
There was news for me when I got to the herbalist’s that evening. It had all been fixed up. He was getting a proper roof over his head. A small house on the road out of the town. A ‘friend’ had assisted him in finding this new abode. No one I knew. And in exchange for what? He tapped his nose, to indicate it was a secret. He did that a bit too often for my liking. There would be two rooms, a lavatory out the back and a water pump outside the front door, and best of all he still had his river behind him. His river? Sometimes I wondered who he thought he was. But the herbalist had no doubts: he was moving up in the world. He would be able to treat people in his house now, it would be like a proper surgery. And between them and his regulars in the market, he wouldn’t know himself. He had already started to pack. There were crates of glass bottles and jars stacked up in the middle of the room. I would miss the shed, even the mice clanking against the bottles at night. Aggie knocked on the door. Handed him something wrapped in newspaper.