Lettuce.
Onions.
Veal.
Eggs.
Spelled out on a plate that only she and I understood. We would giggle like gobshites, gone on it for hours, until Abba would bang his fist down on the table and scream at us to stop.
‘Kike!’ Sister Monica bellowed now across the canteen. ‘Eat your fecking grub.’
Or there was this one time, a year after my Bar Mitzvah, when I caught my mother crying in the kitchen. She was doubled over the counter halfway between the dairy utensil cupboard and the meat utensil cupboard (because of course, the two aren’t supposed to mix – something about the life force between an Ima and a child). I was right beside her before she even realised, and then she got all flustered, blaming her tears on the onions, so to be funny I took out a flashcard and wrote: THANKS SHALLOT, to try and make her smile. But it only seemed to make her blub even harder, the joke somehow lost in the telling.
I think that was the first time I realised just how much I had given up.
A few days later, Alf and I were back in the secret garden, squatdeep in the story and the muck. There was a taste of damp off the air around us, like when the boys in school used to make me lick the library books until the ink came off on my tongue. ‘Open up, freak!’ they would shout, holding my face to the page. ‘Get some words back into you!’
Remembering it now, the stains on my gob must have looked a bit like one of those gammy inkblot patterns Doctor Lally kept shoving at me these days, asking me what I saw; how I felt; what the fuck was fucking wrong.
I stood up straight, though I always felt too tall next to Alf’s chair.
Slouching back, I tried my best to focus on his words, his tale the only thing that might bring me a bit of cheer. By now the week of bog-digging was finished, so all the volunteers were on the bus again, headed back to Dublin. She was sat in beside him, her and her two different-coloured eyes, though she didn’t say a thing.
I pictured the image afresh – the strange mismatch – one green and one brown.
‘When they dropped us off we strolled to her bedsit, there on Clanbrassil Street.’
I shuffled my position and lowered the pen to the page. A glut of ink congealed at the nib like it might form a scab.
‘She made tea, but she had no milk in the gaff since she’d been away all week, so we took it the old way instead. Honey and lemon, like. And you know, I hadn’t had it that way in years and it tasted… well, it tasted of the Old Country.’
Alf ran his hand over his scalp as if to press down on his brain and make it slow.
‘We chatted about everything and nothing. The success of the dig. The weather for the week. Of course, I was still a mad one for the questions, wanting to find out more and more about her, but she was a great one for telling tales instead – distracting me with stories, like. Sometimes they were Irish ones, sometimes Jewish ones – variations, of course, on the same fecking theme – but tonight she started on the one about the Golem. You know it, Shmendrick? The one with the magic spoon that makes the man out of clay?’
I knew the one, all right – the unlikeliest of miracles – so I nodded in agreement, the closest thing to a conversation we could ever share.
‘And she was just about to reach the climax, where the lad comes to life to revenge the downtrodden Jews, when suddenly it hit me, shite-ton of bricks stuff we’re talking, but suddenly I realised… sure wasn’t I after falling in love with her?’
In the silence a flicker of awkwardness passed through me. I clicked my neck left and right and left.
‘So I took her cup and I placed it down and I… well, Jaysus, I kissed her – a proper smacker! Then I kissed her again and again until I led her to the bed where she let me make love to her – for hours, like – the sweetest fecking thing I had ever tasted.’
Alf had begun to tremble now with the excitement, a shake like his hands but going all over his body. While my own body only stiffened the more I heard, a foot gouged deep into the filth.
‘And with every minute I knew for certain that she was the real thing, like – the one. So in me head I started to tell meself another story – the one about the beggar who can throw his voice so he yahoos to a couple of birds who have been blown apart so as to bring them back together. Have you heard it, Shmendrick? Have you?’
I shook my head. No, I hadn’t heard.
‘So I repeated it to meself, over and over; matched it to the rhythm of our love. Because someone once told me that the sex and the type of a child you have depends on the story you’re telling while you make it. Did you know that, Shmendrick? Did you?’
Still he bombarded me with questions, new ones from every angle, which only bred even more, like: What tales did Ima tell for me?
And: Did she learn them on the farm?
And: How about the one tale that I could never tell?
‘Because you see, I had always wanted a babby. A legacy, like, for after I was gone. And even though we were a bit over the hill, I knew there was still a chance we could make it happen; that me love for this lass could be enough to make the miracle come true, our very own root down into the earth that would grow and grow forever more!’ As he finished, Alf flung his arms so hard he nearly clobbered me in the crotch.
I flinched away. A legacy of bruises.
In the silence, Alf kept his arms held out, crucified in the sickly light. His chest panted, his body thrilled by the memory, while I just stood, imperfectly still. And waited.
And I promise I wanted to share in his enthusiasm; to be infected by his joy. To be honest, there was just something weirdly lovely about seeing the wanker so elated – the biggest miracle of the entire thing.
But it didn’t matter what I wanted, because I just couldn’t remember the knack of it. How to smile. How the hell to feel. No, not now – it seemed I missed her too much. I missed the stories she used to tell me every night before bed; missed how she would sometimes write them out and leave them under my pillow, her spelling always terrible. Or how she would sometimes change the names of all the characters to Shem, so that it was only me in her world and no one else.
Shem and the Ark.
Shem and the Whale.
Shem at the altar where his daddy obeys God’s will and sacrifices him to—
Dingaling!
The bell for tea rang my heart out of my throat, down to the dirt below. I watched as Alf dropped his arms and headed off, his wheels crushing the dark-red organ into the muck. And as I hid the jotter and crawled back towards the House I could have sworn I could still feel the thing beating, left bleeding there behind where no one would ever find it.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, the Braille of the springs keeping me awake – a message I couldn’t for the life of me make out. I rolled over. My scalp was belting with an itch.
After a while I tried to picture my mother’s face as usual – the single thing that ever brought me a bit of peace. I closed my eyes; kept my hands down my pants for warmth. Only, for some reason tonight it seemed a bit harder to persuade her to come.
I knew Alf’s spiel this afternoon had thrown me, but I didn’t really understand why; couldn’t figure out why it had left me so awkward, why I couldn’t just be happy for his love. At the very least, I knew I should have been able to see something kindred in the force his affection – God knows I had an obsession of my very own!
I rolled over and tried again, my mind digging deeper like a spade, everything focused on bringing my Ima back to me. Because I knew that if I could just catch a glimpse of her smile then I would be grand, the silence of sleep at last.
I waited; dug my hands a little deeper too.
But when she finally arrived she was smiling, yes, her teeth white as mints and sweet enough to lick. It was the frame around her, though, that wasn’t right at all.
Because it seeme
d Alf’s story was after digging up something else, another memory – another version of my Ima that I had spent the last five years trying to bury away, but which was suddenly back again. And now as then it was clear that I had no choice but to watch the mess unfold, no matter how ugly or how hard it hurt.
It was a Wednesday afternoon and thirteen-year-old Shem had mitched off from school for the first time in his life. He had been working on a map for weeks now, a route home to his Ima where all the streets followed one after the other in alphabetical order. It was a circuitous path, to be sure – all around the houses stuff – but he was high as a fucking kite on it. A then B then C then D. Each one spelled out in his head as he stomped along left then right then left then right then left, dropping Scrabble tiles behind him like a Hansel and Gretel trail. Until eventually he came to G and turned up the Glenvar Road and saw a woman standing there – a figure he recognised straight away without a beat or blink.
In the darkness now the pain began to spread, my body reacting to the memory; a writhe off me I couldn’t manage to keep still.
She was on the front doorstep of a house that Shem had never seen before. Her hair was out of its headscarf, spilled down her back, a long, golden spew. And her fingers were locked with the fingers of a stranger – the tightest grip Shem had ever seen.
My limbs started to twist, jagging off the bed, my bones making funny shapes. I shut my eyes even tighter, but it didn’t matter – the thing had taken hold.
Shem looked at the stranger, touching his Ima; a pale lad in a woolly jumper; a rosy cheek and a look on his face that meant only one thing. Love. And before the truth of his mother’s affair could fully seep in, Shem turned around and ran, never once looking back, all the way home to where his Abba would be waiting to go through the final preparations for tomorrow, the Torah portion and the prayer shawl starched white and the trousers freshly pressed upon the—
‘Shmendrick!’
The slap on my cheek felt almost cold at first. And then it was not. A vicious scald.
I opened my eyes and saw that Glenvar Road was gone. My limbs flopped out of their contortions with the relief. But then they saw Alf instead, sitting up in the bed next to me, holding one shaky hand in the other. ‘Shmendrick, what are you . . .I think you were having a… Shmendrick, there’s something I need to tell you.’
Still my cheek pulsed warm and stingy, reeling from the force of the touch, though it was his words that startled the most. Because it was weeks since he had spoken here in the pantry – a comfortable silence, yes, but a silence all the same – yet suddenly he was saying he needed to break it, which meant that something was very wrong.
‘Shmendrick, we need to talk.’
I lifted my head from the pillow, away from the memory, the effort of it knackering as I went.
‘Look, I’m after… I didn’t know how to tell you… but I’m after getting you a phone call.’
A string of spit clung from the fabric of the sheets all the way to the chap of my lip.
‘Sister Frances,’ Alf explained. ‘I had a chat after dinner, and she… arra, she said that maybe she could… Anyway, I know… I know I said I would help get you out of this place…’ His words were rushing now, bombarding me with something I couldn’t yet make out. Though amidst the confusion, I thought I could spot a hint of impatience, a hint of anger too. ‘But this will have to do for the moment, all right?’ Maybe even a hint of guilt. ‘All right, Shmendrick, do you hear me? Tomorrow afternoon?’
But it didn’t matter, because the following day, just like he promised, I heard only her.
The pretty nun led me down to the front hallway while all the others were out on Yard Hour, sneezing hayfever and dead-skin dust; allergic, like, to life. I could tell Frances was petrified, beetle-eyes going nuts to be sure the coast was clear, but finally we reached the console table by the front door where the telephone sat black-lacquered in all its glory. It was one of the old-fashioned kind, a long thin handle and two eggcups at either end, the hollow of it cold against your ear.
I noticed the letters ‘AH’ etched into the base, the same graffiti I had spied all over the gaff.
‘Right, you’ve got ten minutes,’ the nun explained, craning down the corridor again, the sinews in her neck pulled taut like an instrument. ‘No more or I’ll be dead.’
But how could I tell her that actually, ten was plenty? That really, ten was everything? Ten minutes of my Ima as she answered the call: ‘Hello, Máire Sweeney’, then heard the silence and then, instinctively, felt me there – a split second and then the fall.
The same, I had always thought, as love.
‘Well, what a nice surprise, pet. I’d been wondering when we would hear from you!’ Instantly, she began to ramble, her country lilt banishing all ugly memories away. She told me about the neighbourhood gossip that was doing the rounds; about the new Audrey Hepburn picture she wanted to see; about the pile of books she had just borrowed from the local library. And all the while I pressed her to me, tracing my finger along the curve of the mouthpiece then tangling it in the loop-the-loop cord – the life force between an Ima and a child.
‘I hope you’re eating… Borscht… your mammy, eh?’
The reception was bloody terrible, splinters on the line. The interference of all the things that weren’t being said. But still I drank it up, the nectar of her, savouring every drop.
‘Abba’s in… Sends his…’
Though of course, he didn’t come to the phone himself. ‘Why would I…’ I heard him growl in the background. ‘…a dead handset?’ The ‘d’ word walloped nice and hard.
But I didn’t care about him now, only her, here with me; the pair of us stationary at either end of the line.
‘Aliyah ambassadors… The Kleins heading Friday… can you imagine… a kibbutz?!’
I pulled the phone back from my ear just an inch, her laughter just a tone too loud.
In the month before I left there had been a lot of talk about Aliyah, all right; about members of the community moving ‘home’ to Israel. By now it was a full decade since the country had officially been born, Mazel on her Tov, so more and more Jews had begun to flock East. And meanwhile with Ireland’s economy going down the Swanee, sure everyone here was leaving too, for loads of families it was a double incentive – two migrating birds, one fresh-start stone.
‘Shem? Shem, hurry up please, it’s time.’
But as Sister Frances took the black lump from my hand, I could feel my own fresh start rising over me. Because even the sound of my mother’s voice had reminded me, all over again, just why my sacrifice was worth it; just why I was stuck in here, keeping shtum, keeping her safe.
I promised I would stay positive from now on – no more nightmares; no more ugly memories – just as good as gold until I found my way out.
The nun hurried me back to the yard; the pigeon-grey of the day. Edna Flaherty was doing shuttle-runs down to the boundary fence and then back again, and then back again, wrangling his hands like he was washing them under some invisible tap. Apparently Eoin Moore had been stung by a bee, flapping his fingers like a spastic or like a mock impression of Alf.
In the corner of the yard I saw him, seeing me.
He raised his eyebrows, just a bit. I raised mine back, just the same.
That night I guzzled my dinner, scraping the bowl, a bang of onion behind every bite. And a swarm of silent words rising out of the mush that had the sweetest taste of all.
Tough.
Enough.
True love.
Saturday
Her fingers jitter on the track pad so that the little arrow on the screen jitters too, stuttering over every click.
Cl-cl-cl-cl-click.
Outside, she hears London, clearing its throat. It is only ten a.m.
From? London Stansted.
To? Dublin T1.
> Dates? Immediately.
Return? Yes.
Are you sure?
She places her hands on her lap, trying to make them still. But she hates them for the way they feel empty, as if, somehow, they miss the weight of the book; the heft of everything that has suddenly been lost.
The first time she brought him here to the flat he had looked at her and laughed, genuinely surprised that her offer of a late-night cup of tea turned out to be real, not just some ruse to get him upstairs. He had watched from the sidelines of her half-unpacked kitchen as she filled the kettle, too tipsy to lift the lid so she aimed the water straight down the spout instead, magicking the white crusts of limescale away.
SECURITY CHECK.
Type the words shown above into the box.
She glares at the screen, resenting this demand for answers. For clarity. She sees a wonky ‘L’ slant into a too-thick ‘O’; mangled letters like a ransom note cut out of magazine scraps.
I-CANT-BELIEVE-THIS-IS-HAPPENING.
GET-ME-ON-A-FUCKING-PLANE.
‘Would you like the London Eye one,’ she had asked him next. ‘Or the “Caf-fiend” one I stole from work?’ Still only two mugs in the whole place, squat in an empty brown cupboard with hinges that squeaked as if in pain.
‘“Caf-fiend”, please.’
She took two Barry’s teabags from the box, the last of her stash from home.
‘And are your colleagues aware you’re a thief?’ he asked.
‘Probably,’ she said. ‘“Pikey Irish” and all that.’
‘Ha, I know the feeling. “Scabby Jew”.’
‘Fine for us to say, but if anyone else…’
‘Exactly.’
An unlikely foreplay; the room thick with lust, prejudice and the kettle’s rising breath.
A window pops up now for Dublin hotels; a slew of five-star reviews. A banner ad for The Gathering – the big national reunion the government’s been trying to push – anything to generate a bit of tourism; a bit of much-needed cash. She pictures her childhood bedroom. The bay window. The double bed. Old newspaper clippings stacked in alphabetical files. And the giant poster of Nelson Mandela on the wall where the boybands and heartthrobs should have been.
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